Farmers warned to cut back or face a stark future

By SIMON COLLINS

Australian naturalist Tim Flannery has a blunt message for his country's farmers: "Cut back!"

Dr Flannery, author of a controversial book The Future Eaters and now director of the South Australian Museum, says Australia's farmers are producing more than the country's land and water can sustain.

"There is no doubt that agriculture is unsustainable in Australia and we are going to have to cut back," he said yesterday.

He was in Auckland as an adviser to the National Geographic Society's Global Exploration Fund to encourage New Zealand scientists to apply for the fund's research grants in environmental fields such as biology, geology, anthropology and astronomy.

His scientific work on the evolution of Australasian and Pacific mammals led to a lifelong concern about species being driven to extinction by human activities that forget about the future.

"Australia is facing a national emergency in terms of its environment," he said.

The recent drought highlighted a desperate water shortage, especially in the Murray-Darling river system where water permits had allocated 20 per cent more than the actual amount of water available.

"Adelaide is dependent for its water on the Murray River," he said.

"It may be as soon as five or six years that we won't have drinking water in South Australia."

Water was being poured into irrigation, which made the land productive for a few years but eventually raised the water table and the salt level.

In a recent article in the journal Quarterly Essay, Dr Flannery wrote: "In the wheatbelt today, rivers are 50 times more salty on average than they were at the time of [European] settlement, and it will take more than 1000 years to leach the newly released salt from the land."

Late last year he was part of a group of concerned scientists, dubbed the "Wentworth Group" after the Sydney hotel where they met, who proposed that farmers should be paid to take land out of production.

In western New South Wales, the group said, 34 per cent of farmland should be allowed to revert to natural bush.

"Properties below this threshold should be required to reach that standard over, say, five years," the scientists said.

They recommended a 1 per cent surcharge on income taxes to help pay for fencing off bush areas, revegetation and weed control.

Dr Flannery said state governments were responding. A month ago South Australia announced a tax of about $35 per person per year and $80 per business to buy back rights to Murray River water that have been sold to farmers.

Three weeks ago Queensland decided to stop issuing permits for new land clearing by 2006, and a report on similar action in New South Wales is due this month.

State and federal governments will meet on August 28 to consider co-ordinated action on the Murray River.

Dr Flannery argues that Australia must limit immigration because it is already living beyond the land's "carrying capacity".

He says business has been "addicted" to a high rate of immigration to maintain demand for property and goods.

He accepts a moral case for helping people fleeing from worse conditions in overpopulated countries, but says Australia should weigh up whether immigration or foreign aid would provide "the greatest good for the greatest number".

"Can Australia do anything about the population of China? Realistically, no," he said. "You have to realise what your capacity is to do things."

Two years ago, Dr Flannery followed up his analysis of Australasia with a study of North America, The Eternal Frontier. There, he said, the first human immigrants from Asia 13,200 years ago quickly wiped out many of the large mammals.

But he still believes that the Australian Aboriginals were the world's first "future eaters" when they migrated south from Indonesia into a land untouched by humans 47,000 years ago.

Before then, he says, humans "co-evolved" with other species in Africa and Asia.

He believes that only when humans advanced into the new land of Australia were they able to dominate "naive" native species which had not co-evolved with them - permitting a brief population explosion.

"There was a period in world history 45,000 years ago when a very substantial part of the world's population lived in Australia, because there was a huge amount of resources available to them," he said.

Some of the earliest human art dates from this time, and Dr Flannery believes that this and other advances may have been carried by people from Australia back to Asia and Africa.

But this, he admits, is pure speculation. "There is no evidence yet."