Chronic drought conditions create hardship in Australian rural areas

During a national water summit last month, the Murray-Darling river basin commission dramatically announced that the drought could be the worst in 1,000 years. Since records have been kept only for the past 114 years, the figure was at best an estimate. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that drought conditions in large parts of the country’s farming land are serious and will get worse during the summer.

A statement issued by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology on December 4 painted a bleak picture of the drought intensifying over eastern and southern Australia. The four-month period from August to November was the driest on record across South Australia, the second driest across the Murray-Darling basin and the third driest across Australia as a whole. Significant parts of the country experienced the lowest rainfall on record—that is for the past 100 years.

As the statement noted, the deficiencies “have occurred against a backdrop of multi-year rainfall deficits that have severely stressed water supplies in the east and the southwest of the country”. Many farming areas never recovered from the 2002-3 drought and have been in drought conditions for more than five years.

More
http://wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/drou-d21.shtml