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Drought is a time of hard, parched earth, when dust blows across the dried skulls of dead farm animals and nothing grows. It is like an earthquake, an unpredictable, devastating, natural disaster: a time to rally behind struggling farmers and carry them through a difficult period they could never have prepared for.
This conventional wisdom is fundamentally flawed but is perpetuated by the clichéd imagery of an urban-based and urban-biased media, according to Dr Linda Botterill (below), co-editor of the bestseller Beyond Drought: People, Policy and Perspectives. Drought is a natural part of the Australian weather cycle and by trying to apply a model of European agriculture on the opposite side of the world, we are hampering the development of a sustainable farming industry.
“You have a situation where school children are having cake sales to help farmers whose assets may be worth millions,” Dr Botterill,
a post-doctoral fellow in the National Europe Centre at ANU, says.
“The media is generally poor at reporting rural news. When there is a drought, they trot out the same old pictures of skulls and baked earth and find someone shooting an animal. When it breaks, they film a two-year-old who has never seen rain jumping in a puddle.”
The problem, she explains, is that many people don’t understand Australia’s unique climate. Australia is the only continent on earth where the weather operates on a cycle of years, rather than over twelve months. There is no predictable annual rain pattern and consequently drought is a natural part of the cycle. Farmers can therefore reasonably expect to have a period of drought every few years and should prepare for the bad years during the good years.
Business risk
Drought is simply a risk of their business, she argues, just as a strong dollar can hit exporters. There are no cake sales for factory owners who can’t sell their wares because overseas buyers are put off by the exchange rate.
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Dr Botterill's latest book contains a chapter on strategies employed by Indigenous Australians in periods of drought.
Read more
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Current perceptions of drought are a colonial relic, based on a European attitude to weather that is wholly inappropriate in Australia — an attitude which kept drought in the Government’s natural disaster relief arrangements until 1989.
“There is so much emotion tied up with this issue, but we wanted to inform the public and policy debates. There is a gap in public understanding that drought is a natural part of the Australian climate. We react like it’s shocking and we couldn’t expect it.
“We aimed this book at the intelligent lay reader. We want to get a better policy debate by helping people understand this issue.”
Before any of the book’s authors put pen to paper, Dr Botterill and co-editor Melanie Fisher, the then Deputy Executive Director of the Bureau of Rural Sciences, held a public workshop to develop themes for the book. That the first theme they came up with was ‘Learning to be Australian’ illustrates the kind of fundamental change in public understanding they were aiming for.
“People intuitively understand what it means when the Reserve Bank puts up interest rates. We want them to know what it means when the Southern Oscillation Index (a pressure differential, which is a key indicator of drought conditions: minus 15 or minus 20 signifies an increased chance of severe drought) goes up and down.”
Just as people may not grasp the functions of climate, the book also hopes to inform the general public about areas of existing drought policy they may be unaware of, Dr Botterill says. For example, the current drought is estimated to cost the Federal Government
$2 billion — a lot of money when you consider that there are only about 120,000 farmers in Australia. Not all of the nation’s farmers are in drought and of those who are drought-affected, not all are eligible for relief.
“The ordinary taxpayer deserves to be better informed. For example, farmers can be eligible for up to $100,000 to cover the interest on loans during drought. I know of at least one case in which a grant of $70,000 has been made. If $70,000 is just the interest, that’s a pretty big loan and you’d need assets of over a million dollars to get that kind of credit.
“Some models show that fluctuations in farm incomes arising from drought are in the same realm as exchange rate movements and commodity price movements — farmers are already managing uncertainty in commodity markets.”
Reform
Dr Botterill says the book is in no way anti-farming and that farmers’ organisations agree there is a need to reform drought policy. Similarly, she recognises the need for assistance to be given to some farmers during times of hardship and is exploring a system modelled on the Higher Education Contributions Scheme (HECS) with the architect of HECS, ANU Professor Bruce Chapman.
The book itself, published by CSIRO, has proven to be a surprise bestseller, taking the number eight spot in the New Scientist top ten of popular science books in February this year. Dr Botterill says that although the book was prepared with lay readers in mind, its remarkable success has been a “complete surprise”.
One reason for its success is that it was published during the current drought — a cynical marketing ploy, you might think, but in fact Dr Botterill had hoped to publish book outside a drought period, so any debate on the subject would be less emotionally charged. The weather had other ideas.
“The public has been very conscious of drought in the last couple of years, and there is also a Commonwealth Government review of drought policy underway so people with an interest in that have bought it.”
Or she has another possible explanation: “It’s on the reading list for one of my courses, but that only has 35 students!”
The success of the book has inspired an academic text aimed at an international audience. Australia is leading the developed world in moving towards a risk management strategy to cope with drought and a new book, edited by Dr Botterill with US drought expert
Don Wilhite, is designed to help other countries learn from Australia’s unique experience.
Released in December 2004, From Disaster Response to Risk Management: Australia’s National Drought Policy has a similar structure to Beyond Drought, but has been largely rewritten to cater to academic needs.
It also contains a number of new chapters including one by Dr Deborah Rose from ANU on the strategies Indigenous Australians have employed in periods of drought, strengthening the book’s uniquely Australian perspective. Read more
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