The Murray is the lifeblood of Australia's farming country, a legendary river that once thundered 1,500 miles from the Snowy Mountains to the Southern Ocean. Now, it's choking to death in the worst drought for a thousand years, sparking water rationing and suicides on devastated farms. But is this a localized national emergency, or a warning that the Earth is running out of water?
Australian farmers pride themselves on their resilience. They take pleasure in living in a sun-burnt country of droughts and violent rain storms. Conservative and deeply skeptical, many dismiss global warming as hogwash. But with unprecedented water scarcity and the Murray, the country's greatest river system, on the verge of collapse, warning bells are ringing around the globe.
Financially, the drought is affecting places as far away as the UK, pushing up the cost of bread in British supermarkets as wheat prices reach a 10-year high. Scientists are looking on nervously, wondering if what is happening in Sydney could be the future for other towns and cities around the world.
Professor Tim Flannery, an Australian environmental scientist and an international leader on climate change, has no doubts. ‘Australia is a harbinger of what is going to happen in other places in the world,' he says. 'This can happen anywhere. China may be next, or parts of western USA. There will be emerging water crises all over the world.' In Kenya, the herdsmen of the Mandera region have been dubbed the 'climate canaries'the people most likely to be wiped out first by global warming. In Australia, the earth's driest inhabited continent, it is the farmers who are on the frontline.
This extended dry spell began in 1998. Four years later came the once-in-100-years drought. Last year was declared a once-in-a-millennium event. Every city, except for Darwin, is facing water restrictions. Rivers are reduced to a trickle a child can jump across. Old Adaminaby, a town drowned by a reservoir 50 years ago, has resurfaced from its watery grave. Distressed koalas have been drinking from swimming pools. The list goes on.
The extent of the crisis was illustrated in January, when the Prime Minister, John Howard, announced a £4.5bn package to take control of the Murray-Darling basin, the nation's food bowl, accounting for 41% of Australia’s agriculture and £9bn worth of agricultural exports. The region covers an area the size of France and Spain combined, and is home to almost 3 million people. But its famous waterway, the River Murray, no longer holds sufficient water to flow out into the sea. Despite Howard's massive rescue plan to overhaul the water system, six months later the irrigation taps to the region's farmers were turned off.