29th October 2010

STATEMENT:  

“They (MDBA) need to look at all avenues other than farmers, like the Menindee Lakes and further down the system, because they could save a lot of water there where there's high levels of evaporation."  (Source: Comments ascribed to Peel Valley Water Users Association).

FACT ONE:  

There is no doubt that significant water loss occurs from natural environmental assets. However these same assets make essential contributions to services provided by Murray-Darling ecosystems, with an estimated value of 2 billion dollars (Source: Australian Conservation Foundation). These services are essential to Basin communities, and all who seek to make use of Murray-Darling water.

In addition, these internationally-recognised wetlands are major contributors to regional tourism and recreation, estimated in 2006 to be worth around 3.5 billion dollars (Source: Murray-Darling Basin Commission).

FACT TWO:

However, of greater concern is the construction, over recent decades, of poorly regulated, private water impoundments, usually less than five metres deep when full, with large surface area relative to the volume impounded. It has been estimated that these vast, man-made lakes, typically constructed in semi-desert terrain by agribusinesses involved in the broad-acre irrigation of water-intensive crops, most notably cotton and rice, are subject to 50% evaporation rates (Source: Murray-Darling Basin Commission).

Unlike that required by ecosystem assets, a large percentage of the water entrapped in these private impoundments, if not lost by evaporation, is effectively removed from the Basin, shipped overseas as “virtual water” contained in the harvested product.

This is of particular relevance to cotton cultivation, which in 2005-06, in the midst of the recent severe drought, consumed in excess of 1,500 billion litres of precious Murray-Darling water (20% of the total amount of water used by Basin farmers in that year) to grow a crop worth less than 800 million dollars. In 2005-06,  the gross value of agricultural production in the MDB was 15 billion dollars (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics).