From fire to flood for Australia farmers

By Mark Ralston
Sunday 23 January 2011 HORSHAM (AFP) — Marshall Rodda weathered Australia’s decade-long drought, but as he recovers from record-breaking floods the seasoned farmer can’t help thinking that when it rains, it pours. Before the rains began in April, Rodda was among the thousands of Australian farmers struggling to make ends meet in the country’s “Big Dry” — 10 parched years marked by ruinous weather and blamed for many suicides. The exceptional dry period, brought on by an intense El Niño weather pattern, primed the southern state of Victoria for “Black Saturday”, an explosive firestorm which killed 173 people in February 2009, razing entire towns. Two years later the state, along with an area larger than France and Germany combined in the country’s northeast, is battling churning floodwaters that have filled Rodda’s dams to bursting and wrecked his cereal and bean crops. … The vast island continent of Australia, with climate zones ranging from the tropical to the alpine, is characterised by extremes. Its sheer size, location and the fact that it is surrounded by oceans make it especially vulnerable to the parching El Niño phenomenon and its cousin, La Niña, which brings cyclones and flooding rains. One system tends to dominate for a number of decades and then give way to the other, said the National Climate Institute’s Blair Trewin, explaining that the 1990s and 2000s were El Niño periods, while the 1950s and 1970s brought floods. Many rural families have worked the land for generations and are used to swings in their fortunes, but Queensland farmer John Cotter said the severity of the most recent drought and floods had pushed some to breaking point. “When you get 10 years or more of the worst drought on record followed by these horrendous events … the potential for some people to cope with that economically is, I think, more than a challenge,” he said. “It’s really, I think, going to stress a lot of people economically past the point of survival.” Many areas in both Victoria and Queensland were expecting their first bumper harvest since the drought when the flooding hit, wiping out whole fields, orchards and plantations. The excitement of finally emerging from drought made the deluge even more crushing for some, shattering what little reserves were left and resurrecting fears of debt and destitution, said National Farmers’ Federation chief Jock Laurie. “You’ve got a crop sitting there waiting to be harvested one day, and you turn around the next day and it’s all gone — you’ve lost all your hard work, all your income, all your investment. It’s just gone,” Laurie said. Some farmers had already pre-sold their produce and spent the money, meaning they would have fight their way out of contracts empty-handed. “The impact is not one dimension, it comes from all angles — emotionally, financially, just really pulling the rug out from underneath them,” he said. Alex Livingstone, president of horticulture lobby group Growcom, said some growers had lost up to $10 million dollars in stock and suffered such extensive damage that it would be years before the land could be used again. “They were born in 1950 and they were probably working on the farm before man walked on the moon,” Livingstone said of the devastated farmers, whose average age is 60. “They’ve been there that long, what do they go and do now?” The weather bureau’s Trewin said the “jury’s still out” on whether the climate extremes were becoming more severe, but Laurie was in no doubt. “Those are things that have never been seen in our lifetime and won’t be seen in our lifetime again, we’re talking extremes of events,” he said of the most recent drought and floods. …

From fire to flood for Australia’s farmers