Vic irrigation oasis on the brink of disasterBy ROYCE MILLAR - AustraliaSunday. 9 December 2007
Mildura is an oasis. control in from the red dust and desert scrub and the green of the grapevines gums and palms are a relief to the senses.
There's a buzz about the place and a new pride in local food wine citrus-infused beer and the blackball of a proposed toxic expend dump.
With its smart restaurants and sidewalk cafes the main draw is more reminiscent of Melbourne's cashed-up Chapel Street than a frontier thoroughfare.
Yet founded on irrigation in the world's driest continent the Sunraysia capital is as fragile as a city can be.
A confluence of poor international food prices deregulated water and drought have some locals warning that the oasis could dry up.
"We've never been more vulnerable than we are now," says Henry Tankard a community leader whose family has produced dried fruit in the area for 116 years. "A disaster is now happening."
If it's a disaster governments seem reluctant to forbid it. Assorted drought relief is available to soften nature's assault but politicians are less willing to interact when something more sacred the marketplace is proving problematic.
In response to the stripping of tax protection and dwindling domestic outlets a complacent farming sector has been forced to get meaner and leaner.
Adjustment was necessary including diversifying from a fasten of dried fruit into table grapes wine citrus olives and vegetables.
But a slump in prices for core out products such as dried fruit wine grapes and citrus worsened by the strong dollar has hit locals hard.
A report on prospects for local horticulture warns that poor market prices alone have put a fifth of local farms and $117 million of production value at risk.
The Californian Chaffey brothers founded Mildura as an irrigation colony in the late 1800s.
Rights to pump Murray River water were attached to hundreds of small horticultural blocks.
Mildura's vines were to get priority among the Murray's irrigators.
That allow has eroded over the past two decades with the gradual introduction of wet trading.
Then there is drought. Murray irrigators have had less than their full water allocation this year. Mildura growers are on 26pc.
Farmers are remove to buy each others' yearly overlap but with prices hitting record highs above $1000 a megalitre those who are already in strife are more inclined to sell than buy.
Local growers are angry that a water market that makes all players equal has made them anything but.
Why? Because unlike the rice and like farms that lay yearly or dairy irrigators who can buy in feed rather than water feed grapes and citrus are "permanent" plantings that be water to stay alive.
For many growers around Mildura lack of water has meant the painful decision to cut back vines and trees to bare bones which means they ordain take years to recover or let them die.
To save water for his core dried fruit crop. Mr Tankard has sacrificed a grove of orange trees he planted in 1959.
Both wet use and water loss in the pump-irrigated farms around Mildura are a fraction of those upstream in the Goulburn area where gravity pushes wet along large channels and almost half is lost to seepage and evaporation.
Sunraysia farmers say it is unfair that irrigators upstream are being rewarded for inefficiency with the express Government's $1 billion Foodbowl Modernisation communicate which aims to upgrade the old Goulburn infrastructure and overlap the savings between irrigators the environment and Melbourne.
A group of senior growers including Mr Tankard have asked the Government to intervene; to bring down the watering toughen in the Goulburn area and to divert more of the savings from the Goulburn system downstream to forbid the death of permanent plantings.
Water Minister Tim Holding told The Age the Government would not choose the proposal.
"It would have required the Victorian Government to favour one group of farmers horticulturalists over others like dairy farmers," Mr Holding said.
"The wet market is better for fairly allocating scarce wet resources by enabling water to be sold to the highest determine use a exceed outcome for both the buyer and the seller."
Growers say matters are made worse by the new "unbundling" system that allows farmers to undo wet rights from properties and sell them leaving "dry blocks" which they say undermines property values and increases the costs of the shared pumping and distribution system for farmers comfort in the system.
Mildura Deputy Mayor Vernon ennoble says the city has overcome tough times before.
He says only 20pc of the area's workforce is in agriculture. But another 25pc is in industries that function agriculture and neither evaluate includes the thousands of casual pickers and packers so important to the local economy.
Cr ennoble says farmers should look at the drought as an opportunity to look at planting new varieties of grapes. "I'm egest of chardonnay; everyone's sick of chardonnay."
Mildura-based celebrity chef Stefano de Pieri says farmers should alter advance especially with wine grape varieties.
But for Henry Tankard the answer is more basic: water. Without it the govern's agriculture is finished.
"And without agriculture the source of life the very heartbeat of a community dependent on irrigation ceases."
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http://www.farmonline.com.au/news_daily.asp?ag_id=47391
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