Sydney residents woke to a red dawn on Wednesday; a dramatic pall of dust that one tabloid newspaper described as being akin to a ''dusty doomsday''. It was indeed an awe-inspiring sight, but beyond coping with the frustration of cancelled ferry services, delayed airline flights and elevated air pollution levels, few Sydneysiders would have dwelt on its wider significance. Wednesday's storm was a manifestation of a severe drought gripping inland areas of south-eastern Australia, but there can be little doubt it was exacerbated by the fact that large areas of the inland have been debilitated by years of overstocking and overproduction, or denuded by introduced feral animals.
Australia is a land of ancient and thin topsoils which produce a return only when plied with large amounts of fertiliser and fossil fuels. And our soils are becoming thinner all the time. Indeed, it's estimated that more than 75,000 tonnes of soil were shifted across NSW every hour during Tuesday's and Wednesday's dust storm.
Despite the vagaries of its seasons and the paucity of its soils, Australia has never had any trouble feeding itself. Indeed, it is a net exporter of food principally wheat. But the current drought, and worries that it could become a semi-permanent climatic feature as a result of global warming, have given rise to fears that Australia may cease to be a significant food exporter, or indeed be able to produce enough food for itself. Grave fears are held for the irrigation areas of the Murray-Darling Basin, where drought and the over-allocation of water has had a severe impact on farm production and the environmental health of the riverine system.
A Senate select committee investigating how Australia can produce food that is environmentally sustainable, economically viable (for farmers) and affordable for consumers heard in March that reduced water entitlements will ''have a severe impact on Australia's capacity to produce both food and fibre, and as a result is going to have an impact on the price that we pay for it''.
Some politicians, like Senator Bill Heffernan, have argued that we could hedge our bets over the future viability of the Murray-Darling basin by shifting our agricultural focus to northern Australia, where rainfall is more reliable and where there are greater irrigation opportunities, but a CSIRO study has raised serious doubts about whether this is feasible. The study found the area stretching from around Cairns in Queensland to Broome in Western Australia had little or no rain for up to six months a year, and that evaporation rates in the dry season were extremely high. The irrigated farming practices of the Murray Darling could not be replicated in the north, said Dr Richard Creswell, the report's lead author. Moreover, the Top End would never be the food-bowl of Asia unless more dams were built or sensitive aquifers mined. Without suggesting that farming would never prosper in northern Australia, Creswell argued those who were considering investing there were courting failure unless they took the trouble to thoroughly understand the complexities of the ''hydrological cycle in total''.
In response to the study, Heffernan said (probably correctly) that Australia could not afford not to examine opportunities to develop the promising parts of the north. However, the chequered history of the Ord irrigation scheme, and the huge logistical problem of shifting produce to markets far away to the south suggests the Top End may never be more than a niche food producer.
For more, pick up a copy of today's Canberra Times