Australia's Howard warns drought is "unprecedentedly dangerous"

Apr 19, 2007, 4:19 GMT

Sydney - The worst drought on record has brought about an 'unprecedentedly dangerous situation' for farmers on Australia's prime agricultural land, Prime Minister John Howard said Thursday.

Without heavy rains in the Murray-Darling basin in the next six weeks farmers will be denied water for irrigation so that millions of townsfolk further down the river system won't go thirsty.

Householders in all Australia's major cities are already on tight water restrictions and these are likely to be tightened further to cope with a changing climate where temperatures are higher and rainfall is lower.

Murray-Darling farmers account for a third of agricultural production and three-quarters of irrigated acreage like vineyards and orchards.

'If it doesn't rain in sufficient volume over the next six to eight weeks, there'll be no water allocations for irrigation purposes in the basin,' the prime minister told reporters. 'It's a grim situation and there's no point in pretending to the Australian public otherwise.'

Howard refused to say whether farmers whose wells were dry would be forced out of business.

'It will be another blow if it doesn't rain, that's self-evident, but I don't want to start using these apocalyptic terms in a general fashion,' Howard said. 'We know already that the drought has taken up to three-quarters to 1 per cent off our growth - the longer it goes on the harder the impact.'

New South Wales Irrigators Council chief executive Doug Miell said orchards of oranges, grapes, olives and almonds would not survive without water pumped from the Murray-Darling.

'The quality of their produce, if there is any, will be a lot lower than it ever has been and I would suspect most of them would be struggling for income and struggling to survive,' Miel said.

Opposition Labor Party deputy leader Julia Gillard blamed the Howard government for the water crisis, saying its refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol on curbing climate change was evidence of its indifference.

'Unless this country addresses the challenge of climate change, future water shortages and future droughts may go from bad to worse,' Gillard said. 'A mob of climate change sceptics can't fix climate change for this country.'