Australian drought driving farmers to desperation: experts (suicides)

[Gold Metal Flake]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061017/wl_asia_afp/australiadroughtclimatewarmingeconomy_061017080706

SYDNEY (AFP) - Australia's worsening drought is driving farmers to suicide and government funds should be used to help them leave increasingly unviable land, scientists and politicans said.

<snip>

The side effects of the worst drought in living memory include mental illness, depression and suicide in rural communities, said opposition Labor Party health spokeswoman Julia Gillard.

It had been estimated by the mental health organisation Beyond Blue that one Australian farmer commits suicide every four days, she said.

<snip>

But the suggestion of exit payments to farmers was criticised as "un-Australian" by a member of parliament for the rural-based Nationals party, which is part of Howard's coalition government.

"We would lose something of our character, we would lose something of our identification as Australians if we ever allowed the number of farms in our nation to fall below a critical mass," he said.
<snip>

(This drought is affecting wheat and cattle production. This will affect the world's food supply. Could this be the future of the American midwest?)

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. The important thing is that our property rights entitled mid-western

farmers have complete access to all the water they want to water crops that are not suited for the mid-western climate. That's the important thing. Science be damned.

[Gold Metal Flake]

4. And the aquifers are being drained as a result.

More corn! We need more corn! GM corn, preferably. Corn diapers, corn window drapes, corn indoor/outdoor carpeting...

[wholetruth00]

2. Is this the land that was taken from indigenous people in Australia?

[Gold Metal Flake]

3. How the hell would I know that?

Since the continent was colonized by force, as was ours, I would assume so. Take a look and post what you find.

Meanwhile, Australian conservatives would rather farmers starve and kill themselves in order to retain some semblance of a marketable tourists vision of Australian "character".

[Lexingtonian]

5. Duh.

Gee, take the world's driest continent and farm it as if were one of the really wet ones. Good thinking!

The Murray-Darling river drainage in southern Australia is notorious for ridiculous, unsustainable, efforts to keep European cattle ranching and agriculture going. There has never been enough water there in an average year to do it at the scale needed to make it economically viable in our times.

I didn't know that 'Australian' means 'European-Australian', but I guess Caucasian right wingers worldwide are all the same in creating this semantic confusion and imagining that they live in part of Europe. Trying to re-create Europe in other parts of the world is part of it. You know, insisting on Bermuda grass lawns in Palm Springs (those golf courses there are an absurdity), grazing the ranges of the Southwest into wastelands, destroying deserts by filling the horizons and foreground with pointless human-built objects, and plowing under prarie as much as possible.

The American Midwest gets enough water for sustainable industrialized European crop agriculture. Well, close enough for the time being, anyway. The most insustainable places are in the Southwest- the Valley of California, in Arizona, along upper the Rio Grande. Ranching and overgrazed lands (generally public lands) are another part of the story.