Australia's starving for population policy

Our land abounds in nature's gifts, or so says our national anthem.
When Peter McCormick composed the anthem in 1878, those gifts were thought to be our vast agricultural lands. It was a time of unbounded optimism.

While Australia’s fickle climate and unreliable water supply had defeated many a pioneering pastoralist, the first irrigation scheme in 1887 heralded a period of increased agricultural productivity.
Indeed in the decades that followed many predicted that Australia could support a population of several hundred million, just like the similarly sized USA.
We now understand that much of the Australian continent has poor soils leached of their nutrients over millions of years. Unlike most other parts of the world, Australia has had little recent volcanic activity or glaciation that would bring new fertility to the land.

So our agriculture relies heavily on fertilizers, in the past sourced substantially from guano on Pacific islands such as Nauru, now only used as a place to park unwanted asylum seekers.
In the second half of the twentieth century agriculture was boosted by petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides, and the wholesale mechanisation of farming based on petroleum fuels. It is accurate to say that modern industrial agriculture is a process for turning petroleum into food.

There are those who continue to dream of an Australian population of a hundred million. But Australia’s agricultural production peaked in 2002 at a level that would feed about 50 million people and has since fallen as a result of prolonged drought.
The recent announcement that there may be no water available for irrigation in the Murray Darling basin came as a shock. Analysts began to think the unthinkable - that Australia might become a net importer of food in years to come.

Last week CSIRO climate scientist, Dr. Bryson Bates, predicted that flows into the Murray Darling basin will drop by up to 48% by 2100. This will devastate agricultural production and harshly impact struggling rural communities.
But there is another problem. As the production of oil goes into decline worldwide and pressures increase to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the fertilisers and pesticides that underpin much of Australia’s agricultural production will become less available and more expensive.

One thing is clear – with the real prospect of Australia being unable to feed even its current population it desperately needs a long term population policy. In the meantime our household has just planted a veggie garden. I suggest that you do the same.

This was originally published in Fraser Coast Chronicle 29 May 2007