Australian Government To Consumers: Expect Sharp Food Price Rises - Reuters

[hatrack]

Good thing they're not doing anything radically dangerous that might effect the economy by buying into some half-baked climate treaty, huh?

CANBERRA - Australians were warned on Friday to expect sharp food price rises and the possible end of some farming in the nation's food bowl as the government braced to shut off water to drought-ravaged irrigators.

Prices for fresh produce, including citrus and stone fruits, grapes and apples, could triple within weeks of a mid-May water cut-off announced by Prime Minister John Howard, farmers said. "It's like a bad dream that could spell the end of irrigated farming as we know it," fourth-generation farmer Bruce Atkinson told local newspapers. Howard said on Thursday that irrigation would be stopped, along with water for environmental river flows, unless heavy rains fell across the continent within the next 6 to 8 weeks.

He asked Australians to pray for rain in the food bowl Murray-Darling River basin, an area the size of France and Spain which accounts for 41 percent of the nation's agriculture.

"In over 100 years of streamflow and rainfall records, the key Murray-Darling Basin headwater catchments have never been as dry as this," Howard and Australian state leaders said in a rare joint statement released on Friday. Parts of Australia have been in the grip of drought for a decade. Analysts say the A$940 billion (US$783 billion) economy would grow up to one percent more in fiscal 2006-07 were it not for the drought.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/41513/story.htm

[jilln]

1. Time for Australia to go vegetarian!

Since calorie for calorie, animal agriculture uses astronomically more water than growing grains, fruits and vegetables.

[GliderGuider]

2. "He asked Australians to pray for rain"

Yeah, pray, that's the ticket. Much better than doing something that might have helped. Like listening to Tim Flannery for instance.

From Ambrose Bierce: "Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy."