Word: droughts
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...thought so dark has lodged in the mind of Les Gordon, a rice grower near the town of Barham in the country's southeast. But the drought's baking breath has dried and cracked his fields. Gordon should have been harvesting last month across a good portion of his 1,600-hectare farm. Alas, there was nothing to harvest. With no rain in sight and no access to the depleted reserves of government-controlled water, Gordon last September didn't bother to plant a crop...
...longer just threatening Australia's $30 billion agricultural economy, the drought is contributing to soaring world food prices - rice, wheat and corn prices have more than doubled in the past two years - which in recent weeks have triggered panic buying, hoarding and a string of riots across the developing world. "International agencies are belatedly recognizing," says Julian Cribb, a professor of science communication at Sydney's University of Technology, "that the global food crisis is much closer than the climate change crisis or even the next oil crisis...
...demand in these countries is for less rice and more meat and fish, this increases the consumption of grain in the form of feed: it takes 7-15 kg of grain to produce a kilogram of meat. Record-high oil prices and escalating freight costs, as well as drought in the Middle East, have all contributed to world wheat stocks, for example, plunging to their lowest level in 30 years...
...With everything else that's going on, the drought-ravaged rice and wheat farms of Australia's agricultural heartland - the Murray-Darling Basin, named for its two major rivers - have become the world's problem. As to how long that problem's likely to last, scientific opinion is divided. One school of thought is that there's no evidence global warming is causing this drought or will ever cause anything like a permanent one; there's even a theory that higher temperatures could help boost Australian agricultural production by bringing more rain to some parts of the country...
...Capital Territory, isn't water rich. On average, it receives a modest 250-300 mm of rain a year, and much of the terrain is semi-arid. Its farmers have mostly thrived until now because over 70% of the country's irrigation resources are concentrated there. But with the drought dragging on, the allocation of surface water to farmers last Southern spring - planting time for rice farmers - was zero...