The Murray /Darling valley catchments are drying fast : Melbourne Indymedia

It's what the Nile is to ancient Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates is to the Babylonians.

This is where the Australians first learned to till and irrigate the land and where Sheep were first grazed.

A vast expanse of plains and mountains stretching for 3,000km from the river's source high upon the highlands of NSW and into south Queensland, to its mouth in South Australia it drains the continent of excess rain water.

Along the river's banks two thirds of Australia’s crops are grown.
The vast plains that are irrigated by its muddy waters produce most of Australia’s fruit and vegetables, much of its maize and even some of its rice.

The Murray River is also the governments shame as years of talk have amounted to little action to avert the current catastrophe". The river once ran wild, regularly inundating large swathes of the plains that now are desert.
Overused and abused, But today the Murray River is more famous for the exact opposite.

For more than 200 days of the year this once mighty river no longer makes it to the sea.
It's like the Rhine petering out in central Germany, or the Nile drying up in northern Sudan.

Why? In large part humans are to blame, in particular Australia’s governments, who have long believed nature should be bent to man's will.
The river has been overused and abused. Dozens of dams block its flow, drawing off huge quantities of water to grow cotton in the desert.

Cotton not for home industries, but for export raw, to flood saturated markets, a business noone profits from.
Today the whole region teeters on the edge of disaster. Global warming will shortly push it over the edge.
Crops threat
In the next 50 years temperatures in Australia are expected to rise by 3 to 4C.

As they do, the already arid climate will dry further. Leaving Australians to cling to an ever narrowing band of vegetation .
The drought that has afflicted the region for the last six years would become permanent. Climate change will be realized for what it is perminant change. The whole basin will dry up.

The impact on crops would be dramatic. Scientists predict yields in Australia’s main growing region could fall by 40% to 60% .
This would force Australia to import huge quantities of basic food items.

But worse will be the effect upon those who live along the river.

Economic policy has contributed to the river's decline
Some are now predicting the creation of a dustbowl that would dwarf that of the American mid-west during the 1930s. That forced hundreds of thousands of Americans farmers off the land in a mass migration to areas that were not able to support the refugees.

But in Australia the effect would be much worse.
Literally thousands of rural refugees will be pushed off the land, and Australia has no land for them to move to.
Instead they would flood into the cities, further swelling the ranks of the unemployed and dispossessed.

For Australia’s leaders, it's a frightening prospect. However the present policy is to add another blockage to the stream that is barely flowing. The current plan is to introduce a weir on the southern section of the Murray that will prevent water being lost to the lake system near Goolwa.

Already salinity has killed life in the Coorong and placing a weir up stream of Lake Alexandrina will kill all ecosystems south to the sea.

However it is feared that doing nothing will mean that the pumps supplying Adelaide with water for 1 million people will dry up before the middle of summer.

Already Adelaide is suffering its worst drought in history, where water restrictions of unprecedented force have been introduced, but the laws are having the reverse effect.

Water use has gone up in the months since restrictions were introduced.
Farmers in the River land have called upon the government to drain wetlands and block environmental flows, making it clear that people are more important than life on the river.

Unfortunately the government has expressed similar feelings. All money allocated to save the Murray will now be used to stangle the life out of it instead.