Water wastage insanity.

26 May 2005

Yesterday day while checking out The Australian in a Cafe I read about a study which showed it took 21,000 litres of water to produce 1 kilo of Australian rice which sold for $2.50. 

Clearly the cost to produce such a low nutrient, calorie dense food is hugely inefficient especially when there is one of the worst droughts in the last 200 year going on in Australia right now.

Based on this amount of water needed, producing rice in Australia can never be profitable if the real cost of water was included.

This makes a mockery out of the water savings tv advertisments.  Why should I only shower for 3 minutes when there are farmers out there pissing away water like theres no tomorrow? 

Water is an increasingly valuable commodity and whilest in Dubai I read in the local paper that outbreaks of violence were already happening in India over irrigation.

After reading this and also about a desert greening project in Jordan by Geoff Lawton, http://permaculture.org.au/ I am now against any kind of farmer subsidies or drought bailout.  If farms cannot produce without subsidies or bailout money they should be left to fail as they  inevitably will anyway.

http://theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15398923%255E2702,00.html