Today the Northern Australia Land & Water Taskforce will release its latest Report into the development of large-scale agriculture in Australia’s north. The Taskforce has effectively put the kybosh on any expansion of irrigated agriculture and the development of dams across our great northern rivers.
The idea of developing a bounteous “food bowl” that could ensure Australia’s food security long into the future has been a recurring political dream for decades.
But like most dreams they usually get mugged by the grim realities of science and economics – or just turn into nightmares. And there is no shortage of examples of previous failures of broad-scale agriculture across the north to fuel a healthy skepticism about these “grand visions”.
But the lure of grand northern development for politicians and the uninformed is simple and attractive – “We’ve got lots of water, lots of land and there must be something we can grow on that.”
It is an easy political sell – most Australians know so little about anywhere west of the Great Dividing Range or north of the Tropic of Capricorn that you could tell them that kangaroos hopped down the streets of Darwin, Broome and Cairns and they’d believe it.
The Land & Water Taskforce is the most recent of a long line of government enquiries and investigations that have tried to find a way to unlock the mysterious economic potential of northern agriculture.
Established by John Howard in 2007, the first chair of the Land & Water Taskforce was southern farmer and politician Senator Bill Heffernan.
Shortly after his appointment in 2007 Heffernan told the Sydney Morning Herald about his personal “grand vision”:
“This is not about the next election, about the next 10 years. This is about Australia in 80, 100 years time. This is about the nation’s long-term survival,” says Heffernan, the outspoken Liberal senator who promises to prosecute the cause not with bulldozers but scientific brainpower.
“Two-thirds of Australia’s freshwater flows down the northern rivers, compared with less than 5 per cent for our sadly-depleted southern waterways. Because of the way the country was settled they have never been properly tapped.”
But for all Heffernan’s skills as a booster of broad-scale agriculture and development in the north he was dumped as Chairman of the Taskforce soon after the Rudd government came to power.
And reality started to bite big-time as the science came in.
As NT Environment Centre Coordinator and Taskforce member Stuart Blanch told the ABC in September last year following the release of a key CSIRO report into water resources in the north:
“…the report shows that during the dry season there is not enough water to sustain large scale irrigation.
“It says that northern Australia will never be the food bowl of Asia, simply because we simply don’t have the amount of water and land up here to spread irrigation without doing major damage to our rivers, and to the countryside.”
But for many in the north there is little new in the Report’s recommendations – there has long been a healthy skepticism about these grand visions in these parts.
As Bruce Davidson pointed out as long ago as 1965 in his thorough examination of the prospects of northern agricultural and pastoral development in his book, The Northern Myth, it is not just about land and water:
“Unless it can be established that a given combination of land, water, capital and labour in northern Australia would produce a larger output than the same combination of labour and capital with land in some other region of Australia…it cannot be said that land and water are being wasted in the north.
“Politicians, with the support of the press, have taken advantage of the peculiar fascination northern development has for the Australian public to advocate northern development…but neither the politicians nor the scientists have examined the cost of this development.”
A year later in his book The Struggle for the North, J. H. Kelly wrote:
“The fact that these northern rivers discharge an enormous annual flow into the sea does not, of itself, provide economic justification for the harnessing of and particular northern river for large-scale irrigation…this lesson was learned at great cost in the South; such a mistake must be avoided in the north.”
But all is not (totally) lost – as the NT Environment Centre’s Stuart Blanch told the ABC, we need to be a bit more imaginative in our assessment of the north’s potential. The north can be:
“… a great place for nature conservation refuge, it can be a great storer of carbon in its forests, it can be a great global tourism and fishing icon,” he said.
A pretty weak rebuttal of the Northern Rivers myth, if it is indeed a myth. Surely the onset of disruptive climate change in the Murray-Datling Basin is forcing a re-evaluation of Bruce Davidson[‘s 1965 dogmatic opportunity-cost economics conclusion quoted here? A ”given combination of land, labour, water and capital” is not doing so well these day along the climate-stressed Murray, Murrumbidgee, Lachlan or Victorian feeder Rivers. For goodness’ sake, get real!
And the other argument put by Stuart Blanch that ‘We simply don’t have the amount of water and land up here to spread irrigation without doing major damage to our rivers, and to the countryside”” is a typical Greens-oriented philosophy of change nothing in nature, do nothing in nature. The Murray Darling food basin -wilting now because of disruptive climate change and poor water management policies, but in its heyday a magnificent human achievement which grew and sustained flourishing rural communities we can be proud of – would never have been buiilt under that philosophy.
I am not a believer in the northern myth, but if it is going to be debunked, you’ll need stronger arguments than this. I am sure that 30 to 50 million Asian peasant farmers used to doing it tough would find ways to grow their food sustainably in our northern rivers region if they had to. They do it now, in equally dry and inhospitable rural regions in countries like India or Cambodia. I have been there, and seen it.
Tony, how long did the Murray-Darling “heyday” last? 100 years at most? How many agricultural civilisations do we know of that only lasted 100 years? That isn’t even an eyeblink. However, the ecological damage done to the Murray-Darling will be – well, forever to the point where it won’t even be damage anymore but a completely reconfigured ecosystem. Why would we want to do the same thing to the north which is literally the last remaining intact tropical savanna in the world? And as for India and Cambodia – they have mountains that hold snow pack and generate fertile soil for the lush floodplains of the Indus and Mekong, rivers that are orders of magnitude larger than any river system in northern Australia.
I don’t think Stuart was suggesting doing nothing to nature – in fact what he’s proposing when he says “carbon sequestration” is very interventionist – nothing less than broad-scale fire management to reduce late-dry-season fires and increase carbon sequestration. Perhaps it’s time to start listening to the “typical Greens-oriented philosophy”, maybe they have something to say.
I second Tony Kevin’s broad query. Maybe it is true but I am no wiser as to why farming is impossible across the top of Australia. On the other hand, like Syzygium I am wary of the likes of Heffernan who, after his ilk wrecking the MDB (and WA wheatbelt) by running purely short-termist extractivist farming, would happily do the same in the north –if the government helped with the usual endless subsidies of course. His pleas of “feeding the extra billions of the world” is particularly suspect.
Also I do not understand how the north could be a great store of carbon in forest, yet be unsuitable for any sort of farming.
I can answer the second part easiest – for much of the north, most fires occur in the late dry season (August – November) when fire temperatures are hotter and burn more biomass, leading to more carbon being released into the atmosphere. If we were to burn earlier in the dry season (and it has to be “us” as there are no natural sources of ignition at this time of year), less biomass will burn. So, investing in more widespread controlled burning in the early dry season across the north would reduce carbon emissions and, eventually, increase carbon sequestration as tree cover increases. This might also have knock-on benefits for biodiversity and employment in remote communities. Those interested in learning more can check out the West Arnhemland Fire Abatement project (WALFA) at http://www.savanna.org.au/all/walfa.html.
The second, I’m less knowledgeable about, except to say, the soils are very poor, mean evaporation exceeds precipitation for 7 or so months of the year, and it has been tried, and tried again – as far back as the first settlements in the early 1800s.
Humpy Doo, Ord cotton. Nuff said.