Federal Water Minister Penny Wong’s water buyback scheme is devastating drought ravaged rural Australia and threatening our national food security.
From todays Sydney Telegraph.
“Once-thriving rural communities are being devastated as farmers sell water rights back to the government to keep the bankers from their doors. Towns are finding themselves without doctors, tradesmen, teachers and with empty shops in their main street as their agricultural roots dry up and labourers, farm hands, shearers, drivers and the farmers themselves give up and leave.”
The water buyback is crippling the economies of small towns such as Warren in NSW.
“NSW farmers have sold almost four times more water than any other state – almost 400,000 megalitres – in what small towns call the “most disastrous scheme ever entered upon by any government”.
Macquarie Food and Fibre Network chair Tony Wass (pictured) fears saving South Australian wetlands will destroy Murray-Darling towns.
“What they are doing is strangling the food source,” he said. “Every farmer in Australia feeds 600 people. There is a lack of recognition of the value of farming.
We’re run by bureaucrats who make us feel unwelcome on our own land.”
Water4Food Association chairman Terry Hogan put it in a global context:
“We need to make our city cousins aware the tsunami coming is not climate change, it’s food security.”
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Local Federal MP John Cobb says:
“Because of the drought, farmers are desperate and the Rudd Government is deliberately taking advantage of the situation.
The Rudd Government has no plan for what it is doing, and won’t have a plan until at least 2011.
Because of the drought all the Rudd Government is buying right now is airspace in dams and the future of regional communities.
Answers in the Senate show the Rudd Government hasn’t spent a cent on irrigation water infrastructure, despite promising over $5.8 billion.
At the same time the Rudd Government is refusing to invest a single cent into guaranteeing the Nation’s food security, it has refused to stop its Labor mates in Victoria from stealing 110,000 megalitres of water out of Murray Darling Basin via a pipeline to Melbourne.”
John Cobb said he held grave concerns not only for future of regional communities, he was also worried about the nations food security and the welfare of many in regional Australia who are struggling to cope with the drought which is now entering its eighth year in some areas.
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