Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott teamed up to gut Australia\u2019s food bowl last week, finalising Tony Burke\u2019s Murray-Darling Basin Plan to strip farmers and irrigators of a quarter of the water they use to grow food for 60 million people.
\nOn average, the Murray-Darling Basin has 32,800 gigalitres (Gl) of annual surface water inflows. Until this MDB Plan, in a good season farmers used 13,680 Gl, or 42 per cent\u2014in many seasons they used far less.
\nThe finalised plan permanently rips a combined 3,200 Gl of water out of productive farming, to add to the more than 19,000 Gl of untouched surface water that is already left to evaporation, to swamps, and to run out to sea.
\nCompare Australia\u2019s act of national suicide, to China\u2019s current project to guarantee its future food security, through an epic project to divert water from the south, where it is plentiful, to its grain belt in the dry north.
\nChina\u2019s South North Water Diversion (SNWD) project will divert, via three separate routes, 44,000 Gl of water\u2014more water than the entire surface flow of the Murray-Darling Basin system:
\n The Eastern Route will transport 14,800 Gl from the lower Yangtze River some 1,467 km north to Shandong and Hebei provinces and Tianjin, via the ancient Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, which was built starting 2,500 years ago; engineers completed a huge double tunnel beneath the Yellow River in January this year.
\n The Central Route will divert 13,000 Gl from the greatly expanded reservoir at the Danjiang River, and transport it 1,432 km to great cities in the north, including Beijing.
\n The Western Route, in the planning stage, will divert 17,000 Gl annually from the upper reaches of the Yangtze River to the Yellow River.
\nChina is rapidly completing the first two man-made rivers of the SNWD. Ultimately it will divert 5-7 per cent of the Yangtze River Basin\u2019s annual flow of one million gigalitres, to the arid North China Plain, and connect China\u2019s two greatest rivers, the Yangtze and Yellow, to the Haihe and Huaihe rivers in the north. The SNWD will change China\u2019s watersheds, by cutting across the west-to-east flow of China\u2019s rivers.
\nFittingly for such a serious project, China is not stuffing around with public-private partnerships or similar scams. The SNWD is government-funded: $22 billion has been spent as of the beginning of 2012, and another $10 billion will be spent this year. The project\u2019s managers call 2012 the key period in the \u201cthree-year decisive battle\u201d to get the water flowing north. Nothing like this project has been done before in China\u2019s 5,000 years of history\u2014or in the history of the world.
\nCitizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood said today, \u201cChina\u2019s SNWD calls to mind the visionary projects conceived by great Australians such as Sydney Harbour Bridge builder Dr JJC Bradfield, and the recently deceased Professor Lance Endersbee, to divert the massive water volumes of northern Australia into watering the inland and drought-proofing the nation.
\n\u201cFor example, both Professor Endersbee\u2019s conception of the Clarence River scheme, and an extension to the Bradfield Scheme for north Queensland, would have injected enough extra water into the Murray-Darling Basin to keep farming at full production even in drought times.
\n\u201cChina is showing it can be done,\u201d he said, \u201cso let\u2019s finally do it here too, instead of letting green fascists and free traders shut down our existing infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott teamed up to gut Australia\u2019s food bowl last week, finalising Tony Burke\u2019s Murray-Darling Basin Plan to strip farmers and irrigators of a quarter of the water they use to grow food for 60 million people. On average, the Murray-Darling Basin has 32,800 gigalitres (Gl) of annual surface water inflows. Until … <\/p>\n