Water Shut Off in Australia: Wave of Suicides Follows Drought Down Under

It has been a miserable start to the summer in Australia. Yet another dry spring with lower-than-average rainfall promises another summer of failed crops, trickling rivers and farmers in despair.

And there is little Australia can do. On Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile announced that even more parched regions in Australia will be eligible for government assistance, meaning that over 50 percent of the country's agricultural land has now been declared drought-stricken.

Planning also continues for the Wimmera Mallee Pipeline, a $500 million project to build 9,000 kilometers of water pipe to replace the current open channels. The current water system loses up to 85 percent of the water in the system to seepage and evaporation. The new pipeline is to provide farms in Victoria, a state in south-eastern Australia, with water for irrigation.

But that project will take 10 years to complete and will only get started later this year. In the meantime, water levels in the Murray River, from which the pipeline is to draw its water, are extremely low.

Indeed, on Tuesday, it was announced that water is to be shut off for 90 percent of farms along the Murray River in the state of New South Wales on the continent's east coast. The Murray River basin, which drains an area the size of France and Spain combined, normally carries some 11,000 gigaliters of water per year. In the past five months though, it hasn't even hit the 600 gigaliter (one gigaliter is 1 billion liters) mark.

The drought has got so bad that officials are now talking about the worst dry spell in 100 years on the continent. It is expected to shave 0.75 of a percentage point off Australian economic growth, currently running at 1.9 percent. Livestock prices are down by as much as 80 percent as farmers sell off their animals rather than watch them die in the fields, and the Australian government continues to pay out massive amounts in aid to Australian farmers -- as much as $2.3 billion in the last three years.

Farmers on the continent are at a loss. At least 15,000 farmers are receiving aid, another 13,000 require state money to service their ever-increasing debts, and nationwide output is set to drop by at least 20 percent this year.

Noel Trevaskis of Beyond Blue, an organization that fights depression, is recommending the urgent deployment of social workers. More and more farmers are giving up hope and a wave of farmer suicides has hit the country, with a farmer taking his life every four days. The rate is already twice the national average.

The first states to react have been South Australia and New South Wales. The authorities have provided €20.6 million in emergency drought funding and some of that money is to be used to train therapists to help ease the psychological strain on the farmers.

The situation has even shocked the government in Canberra out of their stubborn position on global warming. "Certainly, it has taken people beyond the denial phase on climate change," Senator Bill Heffernan told the International Herald Tribune recently. "For the first time, the cities are focused on their worries about the future of water supply. Everyone has taken for granted that you turn the tap on and water comes out. I think they now can see that that might not necessarily continue to be the case."

cgh/spiegel/reuters