Murray River

Australia was once self-sufficient in rice. We now grow less than 25 percent of domestic rice consumption. The SunRice Group has been importing rice from Vietnam and repackaging it to make-up the shortfall. Since the Corona Virus pandemic, the Vietnamese government has banned the export of rice, while the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has feigned an unprecedented drought. There is a need to not only prioritise health needs, but also to ensure we can feed ourselves. This could go together with the restoration of the Murray River’s estuary.

I have been fortunate to live most of my life through the good times, and in a society so rich and well serviced that we flush our porcelain toilet bowls with water good enough to drink. At the same time, many have complained endlessly about a coming environmental apocalypse, unless all the travel stops, and we allocate ever more water to the environment. Now the travel has stopped, and also the rice growing, but not because of climate change or a shortage of freshwater.

We have a pandemic, and across the world communities have shown that they can do the right thing. Across the world, governments have put saving lives before capitalism and populations have mostly complied. We have been told to stay at home, and we mostly have. In Australia, department store giant Myer will closed from today. Around 10,000 staff will be stood down. Early last week, Qantas announced it was cancelling 90 percent of international flights. A couple of days later the borders were closed to everyone except Australians and Australian residents. My daughter was on the second last Qantas flight from the United States to Sydney, before the entire international Qantas fleet was grounded. She arrived the same day my home state of Queensland began turning back anyone who was not a resident, anyone who didn’t already live here.

She has spent the last few years overseas, most recently working in New York. She has told me that what was most disturbing about her last week there, in South Harlem Manhattan, was the surge in frequency of the sound of ambulance sirens.

New York has quickly become the global epicentre for Corona virus. A virus with its origins apparently in a seafood market in China that also sold wild animals kept alive in cages. Environmentalist Jane Goodall recently said that if anything good has already come from this virus, it is the closing down of that cruel trade. The market was in Wuhan which is a city on the Yangtzee River, where just a few years ago the Baiji went extinct. The Baiji was a grey dolphin endemic to the Yangtze River with tiny eyes and a long narrow beak. The last confirmed sighting was in September 2004.

The Baiji, Lipotes vexillifer, may be the first species of cetacean (whale, dolphin and porpoise) to go extinct in modern times. The extinction will have taken place at a time of unprecedented interest and concern for their large relative the Minke whale. It is perhaps a sad reflection of humanity’s sometimes inability to prioritise effectively on the basis of need, that so many resources and so much publicity has been devoted to ‘saving’ these whales whose populations are relatively abundant, while their endangered cousin was left to die out. In the same way we have been wasting water in the Murray Darling Basin on propping-up a crippled estuary when we could have been growing rice while restoring that estuary by bringing back the sea tides.

NO RICE IN THE SUPERMARKETS

Friday I was food shopping for my daughter now in a mandatory 14-day period of quarantine. I was surprised that there were no bags of standard rice on the shelves in my local Woolworths supermarket. Yesterday I went to Aldi specifically to buy some brown rice, but the line was so long – the line of people waiting just to enter that shop – that I will instead take her rice from my own pantry. Hopefully, the hoarding of food, as the Prime Minister, has described it, will stop. But is anyone in government a reliable source of information when it comes to claims there is enough rice to go around?

I phoned my friend Debbie Buller, who is a rice farmer on the Murrumbidgee River.
“There is no rice here, either,” she said. “Normally at this time of year we would be harvesting. But we have not been given a timely or adequate water allocation to grow rice for some years now.”

There have been claims that the recent drought was ‘unprecedented’, when in reality it was a very wet spring just a few years ago in 2016, in the Murray Darling Basin. Australia-wide the incident of drought has been decreasing since the 1970s and rainfall has generally been increasing. Yet since the summer of 2016-2017, rice growers have been denied a timely water allocation. The reservoirs and the rivers had enough water, but the government institutions responsible for water allocation have given Debbie very little. The mood has been against farming, and particularly against farming rice.

NO WATER FOR RICE GROWING

The Basin Plan has prioritised water for South Australia, and in particular the lower lakes that have been designated a wetland of international importance, even though they are only freshwater by artificial means since construction of the 7.6 kms of sea dyke back in the 1930s that stopped the tide.

The taxpayer-funded Basin Plan is meant to be about restoring the environment, but it ignores the first thing that should be considered when fixing a river system — that is the need to restore the estuary to its natural dynamic state, as I explained to a Senate Committee in December 2015.

The bottom-line is that successive governments have denied upstream irrigators water in an attempt to keep forcing what was once the Murray River’s estuary to remain as an artificial freshwater lake. The water from upstream storages is sent to South Australia and much of it lost to evaporation, including in transmission. The Lower Lakes, that were once a functioning estuary but now barraged in as entirely freshwater, lose in excess of 800,000 megalitres of fresh water each year in evaporation, water that could be used to grow rice and other important staple food crops.

If my good friend Debbie had just 2,000 megalitres (0.25%) of that water that is evaporated, she could grow 2.16 million kilos of rice on just 174 hectares (430 acres). This would go some way to returning us to self-sufficiency. Once upon a time, over the ten years to 2004, Australian rice farmers grew 1 million tonnes of rice in an average year; we were self-sufficient. In Australia we could easily grow enough rice to feed about 20 million people a meal of rice every day of the year. Instead, again this last summer there has been very little rice planted, and not nearly enough available in the Murrumbidgee or Murray River irrigation areas to restock the supermarket shelves.

NO WATER, NO RICE, MILL CLOSED

A consequence was the virtual closure of the Deniliquin rice mill just last year, and the loss of 250 jobs.

To overcome the declining reliability of Australian grown rice because of changing government policy and public sentiment, the SunRice Group decided to instead invest in a mill where there was a reliable supply of rice.

They bought a rice mill in Vietnam with the intention of shipping the Vietnamese rice to Deniliquin for packing and distribution around Australia. Except, we live in unprecedented times, and the Vietnamese government has just banned the export of rice. So, the SunRice Group can no longer bring the Vietnamese rice back to Australia. There is not enough rice right now in Australia to restock the supermarket shelves, and none has been planted.

NEED FOR POLICY CHANGE, REMOVE THE SEA DYKES

Debbie and so many other rice growers would like to grow rice this next summer. But they have no idea whether they will be allocated any water. This situation needs to change. There is already more than enough water in the reservoirs for farming and the environment, if only the Murray River’s estuary were restored. The sea dykes need to be removed and the estuary restored. Then the 800,000 megalitres of water that is evaporated each year could be supplemented with saltwater, depending on the tides.

Once upon a time each spring, after good rains and snow melt, the Murray would tumble down from the Mountains spread over the vast Riverina and wind its way through the limestone canyons of the Riverland before flooding into Lake Alexandrina. By New Year, the river exhausted, and a breeze picking up from the southwest, the Southern Ocean would pour in through the Mouth of the river, and with the seawater came vast schools of Mulloway fish.

The fish came each autumn to spawn. The sea would work its way up across the lake and sometimes into the river proper. And so, the lakes would be sometimes fresh and sometimes salty, but always full of water and each autumn full of Mulloway.

Then the massive steel and concrete barrages were built across the Goolwa channel, that was after the dykes were already built sealing the Mundoo, Boundary Creek, Ewe Island channels and also the Tauwichere fishing area. In the autumn of 1940, the year the Goolwa barrages were completed and sealed, the Mulloway entered the Mouth, passed along the Goolwa channel and died in their hundreds of millions entrapped between the barrier and the falling tide.

The sea dykes killed the Mulloway fishery and crippled the estuary.

In 1939, the annual mulloway catch by commercial fishermen in the Murray River’s estuary was 595 tonnes. There is no longer an estuary; the Mulloway are stopped by the sea dykes. The catch in the adjacent Coorong has been no more than 30 tonnes in recent years.

The technical literature explains the sea dykes and Goolwa barrage reduced the size of the estuary by 89 per cent, and flows to the Murray mouth by 75 per cent. They stopped the tides. We are left with a freshwater lake full of carp instead of an estuary with Mulloway, crabs, waders and the biodiversity that comes when there is natural mixing of fresh and salt waters.

CONSEQUENCES OF HOLE DIGGING AND INFILLING

Some of us have been warning that as a civilization, it is best we not squander our wealth because bad things do happen. They are happening now. ‘Mr FOIA’, the sceptic and the good hacker who brought us Climategate, he warned back in 2009 that:

“[The] Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life. It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it.”

In the same email he described the misguided obsession with human-caused catastrophic global warming as “a massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavour”. The obsession has extended beyond climate change to so many aspects of natural resource management. It is the case that during the 1980 there were salinity issues in the Murray Darling Basin, caused in large part by rice farming. But the problems were solved through clever drainage management thirty years ago.

It is difficult to understand why this good news about environmental restoration is so rarely reported. Instead the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) continues to vilify those who defy agreed narratives when it comes to Australia’s longest river system, the Murray. Both sides of politics court the South Australian vote, and South Australians always want more freshwater including for the golf courses, wineries and the Goolwa sailing club that is just upstream of the barrage.

TIME TO SORT PRIORITIES

Now is the time to be honest to the evidence, to stop the waste, stop the politics and assure Debbie Buller some water for this summer, so she can grow rice for the thousands of people queuing for hours across Australia, trying to access staple food.

Denying Australian rice-growers water will not make it rain during drought, nor will it bring back the Yangtzee River dolphin or stop the spread of Corona virus. Restoring the Murray River’s estuary could though bring back the Mulloway fish. We are seeing for example in the many reports already of dolphins returning to Venice canals and clear skies over long-polluted cities, how resilient nature can be when we get out of the way.

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a global pandemic, and the world community has responded closing whole industries including the travel industry. This health emergency could develop into a food emergency if we continue to hoard food, and if government policies continue to deny farmers access to water.

The SunRice Group have commenced discussions with the Australian government around the potential for an allocation of water to be made available to Australian rice growers who are upstream, this must be ahead of the planting window later in 2020 to ensure continued supply of Australian-grown rice for domestic consumption. Now is the time for sanity, for water to be allocated for farming so Australia can once again be self-sufficient in rice. But this is not enough, now is also the time to restore the once mighty Murray River its estuary.

The Chinese have banned the trade in exotic wildlife at that market in Wuhan. Now the Australian government can dismantle the 7.6 kilometres of sea dyke that deny the wild Mulloway their estuary. That would be a good start in getting out of the way, bringing back the sea tide, and filling our supermarket shelves with rice.

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The feature photograph at the very top of this post is of Debbie Buller on her tractor in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area (MIA). This next spring she would so like to be planting rice.

RECENT billion-dollar plans for the Murray Darling Basin have never been about the environment. Rather they have been about special interest groups doing deals through constant negotiation, with commercial interests in South Australia generally trumping all others.

As Geoff Adams recently explained – with his newspaper article republished in various regional newspapers – Waterfront houses on Hindmarsh Island and its marinas sell for between $500,000 and more than $1 million. Some of this real estate has been planned around the marina where jetties are built to a fixed sea level height, never mind that without the barrages the lake is a naturally tidal estuary, that could be swamped by global warming.

I could go on … but suffice to say there is nothing sustainable about any of the planning for so many years for the precious fresh water from upstream.

Any rational solution must begin with the dismantling of the 7.6 kilometres of barrages built in the 1930s in an attempt to convert the Murray River’s estuary into a play lake for Adelaide’s elite … to go yachting and water skiing. I’ve written about this many times, including in a 2012 report, which can be summarized:

The Australian Government’s $10 billion tax-payer funded plan to save the Murray-Darling by channeling water from upstream water storages and flood plains to the Lower Lakes, Murray’s mouth and Coorong, is based on a false premise; a misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of the Murray River’s estuary and the coastal processes that continue to shape it.

The Murray River’s estuary was formed 7,000 years ago during a period of rapid sea level rise. It was in an intermediate stage of evolution with the central lagoon developing from intermittently closed to fully tidal, when in the 1930s, sea dykes/barrages were built between the island, just to the north of the sand peninsula and the narrow entrance to the Southern Ocean.

These sea dykes dammed the estuary, stopping the tides, and made the lagoon/Lake Alexandrina totally dependent on Murray River flows. After the Mundoo channel was blocked through the construction of that barrage, sand that shoaled around the Murray’s mouth consolidated creating a new island, Bird Island.

Long-standing government policy and vested interests preclude discussion of the coastal processes that are growing Bird Island that may one day permanently block the Murray’s mouth… inevitably flooding the marina at Hindmarsh Island, and its associated expensive real estate.

Back in 1856, South Australia’s Surveyor General George Woodroffe Goyder recognised the potential of the Mundoo channel to scour the Murray’s mouth. He suggested the natural process of deepening and widening of the Murray’s sea mouth be enhanced by cutting though the rock bar across this channel thus further concentrating tidal water inflow and river water outflow. Instead, over the last 156 years government policy has worked to stop the tide and block the channel – but it’s not too late to change direction and restore the estuary and bring back the tide.

LAST week I got to fly over the Murray River’s mouth and Coorong with two, hard-working, cross-bench Senators, Bob Day and David Leyonhjelm. That was immediately after the Senate Select Committee hearing in Goolwa*.  You may yawn: issues discussed included the availability and price of water for food production.

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, water, food, shelter and warmth, are right at the bottom; things we can surely take for granted. Indeed, energy and water are commodities that, if the activists in Paris, and Melbourne, respectively, had their way, we would all pay more for.

Back in 2007, when Malcolm Turnbull was Water Minister and tabled the Water Act in the Australian parliament, many at the Australian Conservation Foundation hoped irrigators would soon be priced out of the water market.

Giving evidence in Goolwa last Tuesday*, Mike Young, formerly of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, and a self-proclaimed architect of the Basin Plan that followed the Water Act, explained that the best thing to come from the legislation and regulation is a transfer of ownership in water from food producers to the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, and various state government and private environmental trusts.  Indeed there are now many holding and trading water for the environment, including a subsidiary of the Nature Conservancy, which is a corporation with US$5.8 billion in global assets.

This season many ordinary food producers – irrigators who would normally grow crops like rice and oats – where given only a small percentage of their actual water allocation after the Bureau of Meteorology warned of impending drought. These irrigators then watched the price of temporary water increase.  So, many decided to sell what little water they had been allocated, because this sale was likely to be more profitable than actually planting a food crop.

An objective of the Basin Plan has always been to get more water down to the Murray Mouth, Coorong and Lower Lakes.

There was an abundance of water in this region when I visited last week. So, much environmental water has been sent downstream that this summer began with water levels in Lake Alexandrina almost one meter above sea level. It is possible to hold water above sea level in Lake Alexandria because there are 7.6 kilometers of barrage/sea dyke across the channels that converge on the Murray River’s sea mouth.

The Murray River no longer has an estuary. Ocean tides cannot push in. The estuary was destroyed when the barrages were sealed to inflows of seawater in February 1940.

As I explained to the Senate Select Committee at the hearing in Goolwa last Tuesday*, the Water Act and the Basin Plan, while ostensibly about improving the natural environment of the Murray-Darling, are in reality resulting in the waste of vast quantities of precious freshwater because the environmental flow is being sent to a region with very little natural environment. At least that is my opinion.   For those with holiday homes at the new Hindmarsh Island marina complex, and who like to take their boat out on the lake, having all the freshwater to splash in – is just wonderful.

Indeed, a past Commodore of the Goolwa Sailing Club once explained to me: in South Australia, there is only one place that we can get our freshwater and that’s from upstream.  Rice and oats, they can be imported from overseas.

May your Christmas be replete with food, even if it is from overseas.

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* Uncorrected Hansard transcript of the meeting in Goolwa can be downloaded by clicking here.

Bendigo-based long-range weather forecaster Kevin Long has repeatedly reminded me that, at the end of the day it is rainfall cycles that are most important in Australia, not temperature cycles. Can we expect a run of drier years in the Murray Darling? Is this the consensus amongst not just the mainstream climate science community, but also the so-called sceptics including astrophysicists and long-range weather forecasters who rely on lunar and solar cycles?

If this is the case, despite the buyback of large quantities of water, Lake Albert at the very bottom of the Murray Darling catchment is in a particularly precarious situation without a direct connection to either the Southern Ocean or Murray River.

In a recent blog post at Myth and the Murray, I have drawn parallels between Denmark’s Bøtø Nor and the Lower Murray, and asked why there isn’t some discussion about the possibility of draining Lake Albert and turning it into a nature reserve?

Meanwhile the mulloway fishery could be restored to Lake Alexandrina simply by modifying or removing the barrages. Indeed record catches in the past occurred during drought years, but that was before the barrages.

Ultimately sensible water policy in the Murray Darling needs to factor in the likelihood that we could be in for some exceptionally dry years, and that the best way to drought-proof is to restore the estuary so the Lower Lakes are no longer dependent on upstream storages. But neither the restoration of the estuary nor the possibility of a mega-drought are on the government’s agenda.

These issues were raised in today’s occasional newsletter from Myth and the Murray. If you would like to receive the next newsletter: click here.