Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
• Fish populations are deemed to be in the range 'very poor to extremely poor'. Wet-
land quality has been seriously reduced.
• Twenty mammal species have become extinct since 1900, and the iconic Murray
Cod (Australia's largest freshwater fish) is in severe decline.
• A further 35 bird species and 16 mammals are currently listed as endangered.
• Climate hange is expected to dramatically afect ish, mammal, bird and plant life
(CSIRO, 2008; Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water Population and
Communities, 2010a).
As a result of these concerns, and others over water quality, the 11,000 kilometers
of river systems in the Basin had been described - in the decade preceding the audit
- as the 'world's longest sewer'. Water quality is affected by turbidity, industrial wa-
ter and sewage, agrohemicals, and salts - in the Basin, over 1.3 million tonnes of salt
are carried through the system, leading to readings well above World Health Organ-
ization recommended drinking-water levels (see Beale and Fray, 1990). In 2007 and
2008, researhers found that the extent of water use in the Basin was reducing the
average stream flow to the mouth of the Murray river by over 60 per cent, with the
river now ceasing to flow to the ocean 40 per cent of the time (in comparison, this
was estimated at only 1 per cent prior to European setlement) (CSIRO, 2008; Depart-
ment of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, 2010a).
State and federal governments have struggled to find solutions to the problem
of environmental degradation in the Basin. The reason they have struggled is that
they have, themselves, been a major part of the problem. State governments, for ex-
ample, have provided leases for irrigation well beyond the capacity of the system to
provide that water. Over the last 100 years, water use in the MDB has increased five-
fold, partly because state governments have been issuing licences for irrigation as a
means of stimulating farming output. But they have often done so without reference
to similar efforts by other states with jurisdiction in the MDB. They have put their
own farmers, and their profits, ahead of Basin-wide environmental concerns. In fact,
an earlier MDB agreement was something of a farce: The MDB Ministerial Coun-
cil had very limited powers, and the states were not prepared to concede power to
an authority that might proscribe limits to productivist agricultural expansion; there
was litle interaction between natural resource management agencies of the various
states in the Basin; and, the pro-development State of ueensland - whih covers
20 per cent of the Basin and is the source of some 25 per cent of water entering the
Basin - was not even a signatory to the MDB agreement until 1996 (see Crabb, 1988;
