As anyone who lives in Australia is acutely aware, water is a big issue at the moment - it tends to be when you found a country in a massive desert - and we’re all being harassed endlessly about water conservation and water use.
So for any city-dwellers who are currently showering once a month, driving around in a dirty car, letting their gardens die, and trying to learn how to absorb moisture directly from the atmosphere through their skin, this article should make interesting reading: no matter how many times you shower with a bucket between your legs, it’s going to make virtually no difference to the water problem in the context of Australia’s overall water use.
Really, it shouldn’t be surprising information. A brief look at the statistics on water use tell us that in 2004-05, 12,191 gigalitres of water was used by agriculture whereas 2,108 gigalitres of water was used by households, with another 2,000ish gigalitres going on drainage, sewage and so on and about 2,000 more on other industries like manufacturing and mining.
In other words, agricultural water use accounts for SIX TIMES more water that Australian households. Or, to put it another way, if Australian households reduced their water use by a whole 50%, this would still only amount to the same reduction in overall water use as a reduction of less than 10% by the agricultural sector. From the Age article linked to above,
two or three large irrigators, such as dairy or cotton farms, would use “in a couple of days” the water the entire city of Melbourne could save in a year.
Livestock and dairy farming use the most water in Australian agriculture. The next two highest uses are cotton and rice farming. As the Ricegrowers’ Association of Australia helpfully tells us,
Rice is a semi-aquatic plant that requires constant moist conditions for survival.
Semi-aquatic. Constant moist conditions. In other words, it should probably be grown in tropical and sub-tropical parts of the world, not the driest continent on Earth.
So, next time you’re feeling warm and fuzzy because you’re sharing a bath with the other members of your household in accordance with the endless barrage of water-saving propaganda, perhaps you should consider that you can probably make a bigger difference to the water situation by doing something like buying rice grown in Thailand or Pakistan rather than Australia. We’re frequently encouraged to buy Australian made produce, but does this really extend to perpetuating industries which are massively inefficient to run in this country and have significant environmental consequences?
hear, hear!
I have been wondering about the real reasons behind the continual barrage of propaganda here in Victoria - is it “green washing” for a government with fairly poor environmental credentials, consensus building among city-folk for tougher measures aimed at the rural sector, or just a sideshow? My instinct tells me it some all of these, but I’m not really satisfied with that answer.
I tend to think a major factor is that farmers are a protected species in Australia. Show me another industry where an economic downturn leads not to businesses going broke, as the market dictates, but to massive government subsidies to ensure that everyone survives.
A significant part of the reason for this is surely the way our federal MPs are elected - because our lower house is geographically arranged, farmers are disproportionately powerful. Whereas annoying, say, environmentalists will only amount to a fairly uniform but small swing across every seat in the land, annoying farmers will very definitely cause major problems in rural seats.
I would say another factor is that most people just like to feel better about themselves by “doing something about it”. Which is great, but doesn’t actually solve the problem…
Is it wrong to be thinking “over-consumption” and “over-population” right now?
In short, no I dont believe it should, but im fairly certain that under the current arrangements that is exactly what is being suggested. My father has been ranting about the ‘damn rice growers stealing our water’ for as long as I can remember, and as a result I always buy Pakistani rice. We (as a society) choose to view the drought-stricken farmers in this country as being ‘hard done by’ - as you have pointed out above, but i cant help but think ‘well, what the bloody hell did you think would happen?!!’.
We have so much work to do to fix the mess made by those who walked before us and the truth is, the reality is too grim for many people to bear. Suggest that the current way we are doing things is not working and people automatically assume you want to go back to living in the jungle. It’s just ridiculous the mindset of some people, yet tell them they will have to pay to watch the footy on tv and ‘OH MY GOD THE SKY IS FALLING IN!’
I realise a shift in the way we do things will mean people will lose their jobs and entire economies will be impacted - nobody said it would be easy - but it should not be an excuse to avoid addressing the issues, look at what is at stake after all. At the end of the day we have no other option than to deal with the water crisis and I agree with you, having shorter showers is not going to fix the problem.
The upshot is there are already so many brilliant people out there working on brilliant solutions to some of our most perplexing problems - ie. alternative fuel sources, desalinisation and recycled drinking water - and it all means progress doesnt necessarily have to be a dirty word. One of the benefits of water restrictions I guess, is that it has forced people to start thinking about the issue more seriously and questioning how it is we ended up in this predicament in the first place, and that can only lead us to somewhere positive can it not?
Good on you for putting into words what many have been saying for years. Now if we can just get the majority of ‘ordinary australians’ thinking the same way we might be able to turn this mess around…. *strokes invisible beard*
FYI you can use basic HTML tags but I don’t think Wordpress supports other types of tags - so for quotes, use the BLOCKQUOTE tag in triangle-y bracket/slashbracket format. Make any sense?
Well, one’s a matter of life and death and the other’s much more serious than that. In all seriousness though, having to pay to watch the footy on TV is a huge issue for some people, myself included, and goes way more to the heart of what it means to be Australian than any bloody flagpoles outside schools or worshipping a bridge in Sydney (what’s that all about, anyway).
Well, maybe people will get sufficiently pissed off that they will actually start asking these questions themselves.
What frustrates me is that the state governments particularly seem very happy to continually reinforce the idea that we all have to live on a thimble full of water a day - I mean, it’s creating this weird sort of gestapo atmosphere where you think that if you use your hose someone might see you and next thing you know an unmarked SA Water van will be whisking you away to the “water treatment plant”.
One idea I think should definitely be examined much more closely is whether there shouldn’t be an open market for water in the sense that cities pay the same amount as the country for water. Even taking into account treatment etc which is needed in the city, this would undoubtedly drive the cost of water in the city way down and the cost in the country way up - and then the price would effectively regulate water use at a sustainable level (with a legislative cap on total use, of course). It would make food more expensive, but if water is so scare, food should be more expensive.
I’m not sure whether a simple cap-and-trade system will work for water, as it depends greatly on where you are (e.g. proximity to a waterway) and the level of treatment applied (potable vs. irrigation quality water). Building a market-based system that takes all this into account, whilst retaining decent minimum allocations for the financially disadvantaged seems to me to to be a very hard problem.