Australia gets UN to delete criticism of MurrayDarling basin plan from report
The federal government has successfully put pressure on the United Nations to delete all criticism of Australia’s $13bn effort to restore the ailing Murray-Darling river system from a published study, according to the author of an expert report.
The so-called “Australia chapter” has been removed from the UN report “Does Improved Irrigation Technology Save Water?” published online by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
Dr Chris Perry, an internationally respected water expert and coauthor of the UN report that originally included a section about the Murray-Darling basin plan, has described his “shock” at the “complete ineptitude” of the Australian government’s response to the UN report.
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Perry and Pasquale Steduto, a Rome-based senior water policy analyst for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, analysed the effectiveness of new irrigation technology in14 countries, including Australia, China, the US, India, Egypt, Spain, Morocco and Zimbabwe.
For the Australia chapter, they used available data as well as the published work of several Australian water academics, including that of Quentin Grafton, professor of economics and Unesco chair at the Crawford school at the Australian National University.
The chapter focused on water efficiency projects, a big plank of the basin plan. It concluded that the Australian government’s multimillion-dollar subsidies to farmers had probably achieved a negative outcome, increasing on-farm water consumption and reducing rather than increasing return flows to the environment.
Published in 2017, on the thirdparty platform ResearchGate, the chapter on Australia says the Murray Darling basin plan’s “subsidy programs” to save water have been “ineffective, poorly conceived” and have “primarily benefited private individuals”.
The “investments have had no discernible impact in terms of reduced water use on a per-hectare basis, or release of water to alternative users”, the original report said.
The chapter criticised the government’s lack of scientific evaluation. There is “no apparent basis for assessing whether subsidised introduction of high-tech systems will actually release water to alternative uses, or simply increase consumption by the extra amount allocated to the farmer,” it says.
Perry, an occasional consultant to the FAO, said his knowledge of Australia’s water changes had prepared him for an unwelcome response by Australian officials to the report’s conclusion that the technical underpinning of the multibilliondollar program was unsound.
“The FAO report clearly arrived at a politically sensitive moment,” he told Guardian Australia. “But that said, I was still shocked at the complete ineptitude of the intervention made by Australia.”
Although the report described how other countries’ irrigation technologies had also failed to save water, it was only Australia that objected to the UN analysis. According to Perry and Steduto, the Department of Agriculture insisted on a process to rewrite the chapter.
“We put the publication on hold, removing it from the FAO website, to allow time for a possible review and editing of the section, which we welcomed,” Steduto said.
The Department of Agriculture says it disagreed with the report’s claim that water savings from irrigation efficiency improvements were not real savings. A department official said “empirical information” from several sources was provided to the FAO. Both authors say the Department of Agriculture did not have any data or scientific measuring system in place to back its claim that water saved through the MurrayDarling basin’s efficiency projects was making its way back to the river system.
“Fair enough if they had data or even a competent analysis to contradict the findings we summarised, but there was none. Instead, their response was a prime example of exactly the type of flawed analysis we criticised in the body of the report,” Perry said.
Steduto insists he and Perry were open to Australia’s arguments in the hope of improving the chapter. “Nevertheless, there wasn’t evidence to support their counter-argument.”
The months-long attempt to produce an amended version acceptable to the Australian government failed, ending in a stalemate. The Department of Agriculture said no agreement could be reached on key technical points.
“Unfortunately, after some time, having not reached an agreement on a mutually acceptable version of the text, it was decided that a fair solution to the matter was to withdraw the Australian section from the paper,” Steduto told Guardian Australia.
Dr Emma Carmody from the Environmental Defenders Office NSW said urgent law reform was needed to improve the transparency of water efficiency projects. “Billions of dollars are being spent on projects that on evidence may not be achieving their intended purpose of increasing the volume of water in our rivers. Money needs to fund quantifiable water savings.”
More water-saving projects are in the pipeline. The Murray Darling Basin Authority has proposed that irrigators be allowed to extract an extra 605GL, based on 36 projects that are supposed to achieve equivalent environmental outcomes with less water. The projects are conceptually the same as the on-farm efficiency projects criticised by the UN water experts.
The amendment is before parliament and subject to a disallowance motion in the Senate on 8 May.
Their response was a prime example of exactly the type of flawed analysis we criticised in the body of the report