What a bloody disgrace this government is becoming on environmental issues, one broken promise after another, one more committee appointed for the sole purpose of delaying another decision and in my view an easy decision. Save the lower lakes of the Murray River wher eit meets the ocean.
What right do any of us humans have to make a decision to flood these lower lakes and destroy a ecosystem that has existed for thousands if not millions of years, what right do we have to destry all the flora and fauna that have developed and adapted to live in this environment. NONE!!!!!!! this government needs to have a look at its self and its water buy back scheme. The we need to look at the type of farming we do in this country.
I am only going to touch on this in this post and will re-visit this topic later.
Let's look at the farming conducted in this country and the irrigation techniques
1. Rice Farms - What a joke, why would we farm rice, a flood irrigation crop, on the driest continent on earth. Let's look at where rice is grown, on the monsoon belt, why.....rain and lots of it. Get rid of the rice farmers, they contribute next to nothing to this country and do a lot of damage.
2. Cotton - another very very thirsty crop as well as a crop that requires ahuge amount of insectisides and pesticides to grow it. Again.....shut it down, we do not need it. The damage sheep do is bad enough, we do not need both wool and cotton
3. Irrigation Channels - why not pipe them, we hear talk about it but it never happens. I remeber Richard Pratt once challenged all the state and federal government to match him dollar for dollar to pipe the irrigation channels. No government agreed. Around 70% of all water in these channels is lost to evaporation. If we could reduce this lose, the water could stay in the rivers. Wouldn't this be an investment in our future, is this not consider vital infrastructure just like a dam or road or bridge.
As I said I have a lot to say on this topic and will come back to it later. The government needs to have a hard looka t itself and start making the tough decisions. Does the value of Rice and Cotton out weigh the value of the murray river and particularly its lower lakes???? I don' think so
What do you think?
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1 comment:
I couldn't agree more. I think that some the agriculture industry Australia chooses to support is often poorly suited to our land. But, from an economic perspective, the farmers must have a right to choose how to generate the best yeild on their land. This is a right that underpins our society, it's the essence of our freedom.
As we as a nation and a world begin to truly price the input costs of agrculture, I think that many of the planting choices our farmers make will be reviewed and changed. In the long term, sustainable agriculture is the only way to ensure that our next generation might have a decent future and accurately pricing the input cost is a great start at determining the long term viability of a crop for an individual farmer, and the industry as a whole.
As for the piping the channels, it amazes me how much the state Governments of Australia can take from it's water assets, and how little it can invest.
Todd
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