By Jim Green
Australia faces "massive economic, environment and social challenges" due to excessive concentrations of salts in soils and waterways, according to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
Arresting the salinity crisis will be like turning around a supertanker, according to CSIRO researchers Tom Hatton and Ramsis Salama. It may take generations to restore some salt-affected land — and that's assuming the necessary measures are being implemented, which, by and large, they aren't. Some affected regions may never recover, regardless of remedial strategies.
The causes of excess salinity include land clearing, irrigation and the cultivation of a range of crops and pastures which exacerbate the problem. These practices result in salts from dissolving rock beds rising to the surface, affecting both land and river systems.
Other problems are closely linked to salinity, including erosion, loss of animal habitat and biodiversity, outbreaks of toxic blue-green algae and acid soils. The problems tend to reinforce each other — for example, salinity leads to poor crop yields, which encourage further land clearing, which exacerbates the salinity problem.
Information from CSIRO and the National Dryland Salinity Program gives an idea of the scale of the problem:
- about 2.5 million hectares of Australian land are salt-affected, and the area of affected land is likely to increase sixfold in the next 30-50 years;
- salinity has reduced biodiversity, including degrading wetlands of international significance;
- more than 80 regional towns and cities have costs related to salinity, including damage to building foundations, bridges, pipelines and roads;
- up to 30% of regional roads have been affected;
- within decades, salt levels in drinking water in several regions may exceed the desirable limits established by the World Health Organisation, and in some regions water may become too saline even for irrigation;
- Western Australia, one of the worst affected states, has 1.8 million hectares of salt-affected land, and this is increasing at a rate equal to one football field each hour;
- in WA, 80% of the remnant native vegetation on farms and 50% on public lands is at risk;
- 80% of river beds and banks in the WA wheat belt are seriously degraded, wetlands are badly affected and riverine systems are largely degraded; and
- in South Australia, at least 20% of surface water resources are sufficiently saline to be above desirable limits for human consumption.
Unprecedented changes
According to CSIRO researcher John Hatton, complete restoration of salt-affected landscapes is unlikely within normal human time scales, and some changes may be, in practical terms, irreversible.
"Research has shown that marginal intervention returns less than marginal salinity abatement. The large-scale salinisation processes we have set in train are insensitive to all but the most aggressive remediation", says Hatton.
According to Alex Campbell, chair of the National Dryland Salinity Program, "An unprecedented scale of change in management practices of primary producers will be needed, with far-reaching production, social and economic consequences".
CSIRO's John Williams says, "Some of Australia's core agriculture, such as the wool industry and cereal cropping, may become a thing of the past within the next 40 years if we are to combat the salinity threat facing our rivers and water supplies".
Williams says that only "radical changes to the way we use land can hope to lower saline water tables across huge areas of the landscape".
The scientists are pessimistic partly because current problems stem from land clearing and other practices which have been taking place for many decades; even if a major, coordinated plan of remedial action was started now, things would still get worse before they got better.
All salt and no solutions
Scientists, bureaucrats and politicians pontificate about the need for radical change, but their specific prescriptions are anything but radical.
There are frequent calls for further research, which can be read, in part, as a grab for cash by the researchers. While the crisis worsens, CSIRO has embarked on an assessment of each and every one of Australia's 750 main estuaries. The Murray-Darling Basin Commission is currently "setting in place a process to develop" new management strategies, and publishing glossy booklets charting its snail-like progress.
Ongoing research is necessary, but the basic problems — such as excessive land clearing and over-extraction of water — are well known, and action is urgent. In Queensland, for example, about 1.8 million hectares were cleared in 1997-98, and land clearing is continuing on a massive scale. Significant rises in salt levels are expected in the Murray-Darling's tributaries in Queensland, exacerbating an already severe problem, according to John Williams.
Corporate, managerialist rhetoric has clearly infected CSIRO, which makes repeated calls for "best practice" environmental management and occasional glum predictions that even best-practice management may not help in some regions. One wonders if new managerial jargon will follow — better-than-best practice management, perhaps.
Over the years, state and federal governments have repeatedly passed the buck back and forth. Salt gabfests are frequent, and scientific and bureaucratic committees are reaching plague proportions. The latest dithering from the Labor government in New South Wales was the announcement of a salt summit to be held in Dubbo next year, and the creation of a cabinet committee on salinity.
Any number of technical fixes have been proposed, and in some cases implemented. These include the use of salt-tolerant pastures and crops; engineering fixes such as ground water pumping, surface drainage and salt interception schemes; and adaptive strategies such as the development of saline aquaculture and of hot water systems, pipe materials and other equipment to better cope with saline water.
Since land clearing has played a major role in creating the salinity crisis, revegetation is clearly part of the solution and has been implemented in some regions. However, the rate at which ground waters recede following tree planting is too slow to impede the release of huge tonnages of salt into rivers, according to Hatton and Salama.
Hatton's research suggests the need to turn a significant part of the rural landscape back to trees or other perennials; revegetation on up to 80% of some catchments would be required.
Economics
Some propose market solutions, including the development of agricultural practices better adapted to the saline environment. Graham Harris from CSIRO advocates "increased use of market instruments" and makes the dubious claim that "Australia is a world leader in applying economic measures as well as technology to achieve better management of natural resources".
But the salinity crisis clearly reflects the pressures and contradictions of market dynamics; to be prescribing more of the same risks a worsening of the problems. As CSIRO's Steve Cork argues, environmental values do not figure on accounting books: "We don't get economic signals when these values are degrading until we find there is a huge cost to fix or replace them".
The dilemma facing many rural producers is, as Harris puts it, that it is hard for farmers to be green when they've been in the red for years.
Professor Peter Cullen gave an illustration on ABC radio's Earthbeat program on October 23: "I saw a farm recently in NSW where the farmer was having great economic difficulties; the agriculture department had told him to plough out some perennial pasture and replace it with an annual crop of wheat. Now that will give him a good cash flow for that year, but it will make his salinity worse in the longer haul. So we have these awful conundrums facing much of rural Australia".
Agribusiness
In the past 10-20 years, Australia's agriculture sector has gone through unparalleled restructuring. This has brought intense economic pressure to bear on farmers, particularly small farmers, who have few options other than to employ unsustainable farming practices in an effort to eke out a living.
Big business interests have driven this rural restructuring, and they have been the beneficiaries. Federal and state governments have been compliant servants of agribusiness in implementing rural restructuring.
Vertical integration has allowed big business to strengthen its control over the rural sector. Agribusinesses have generally recorded high profits over the past 10-20 years, while small farmers have been going into debt and in many cases have been forced off the land.
Governments sometimes try to change agricultural practices through the use of financial incentives, education or penalties. But these "solutions" miss the mark by blaming the individual farmer, who has to be cajoled, educated or penalised.
Breaking the power of agribusiness is necessary before the manifold social and environmental problems in rural Australia can be resolved.