Also, 40% of the nation's rice crop and 80% of its canned fruit product relies on the Murray-Darling River Complex. In all, three-quarters of Australia's water comes from the Murray-Darling River (Hussainy, p. 205).
Of course there are conflicts when so much is at stake. For one, the river carries about 2.5 tons of sale into South Australia "every minute," Hussainy writes. Inflows of saline groundwater are attributable to the problem -- and also, the removal of "native vegetation" and irrigation causes the salt to become a problem. When the native vegetation is replace with shallow rooted crops, it is bad ecologically. The authors say that "sustainable development ecology should be regarded as part of economics" but the "myopic view of technocrats" views ecology and economics as being "antagonistic rather than synergistic" and as a result many of the river's red gum trees "are dying" due to the increase in salinity. Dead trees means the fauna that depend on the trees are stressed; "Water management is a serious issue that requires a complete change in attitude and infrastructure" in Australia (Hussainy, p. 207).
Sandra Postel and Brian D. Richter have a different angle on the Australian situation. They explain that the Murray-Darling basin has "spurred an active water market" that involves the concept of "Cap-and-Trade" (p. 114). New water demands, Postel goes on, are now being met through "conservation, efficiency improvements and water trading. Indeed, the ability to trade water licenses is a key to the cap's workability" because the reallocation of water resources becomes "critical when the total supply is not increasing." Although Hussainy's book was published in 2007 and the Postel -- Richter book went to press in 2003, it would seem that Postel has a more thorough explanation for Australia's effort to combat the chronic shortages of water in the whole continent.
Postel explains that since Australia instituted a cap in the mid-nineties the volumes traded in 2003 are more than "five times greater than the volumes traded in the early nineties." And the cotton growers in Australia have paid "about $560 per thousand cubic meters [of water] for permanent water licenses" (p. 114). The government has made it easy for farmers and cotton growers to trade water rights; there is a Web page for that purpose and here is another example of what the U.S. could learn from foreign water management policies.
Number Three: Integrated Water Resources Management
According to John Dixon and K. William Easter (writing in Watershed Resources Management: An Integrated Framework with Studies from Asia and the Pacific) an integrated watershed management approach helps managers to fully grasp the "range of factors" that affect resource use and development in watersheds. While using the actual boundaries of the watershed as boundaries or jurisdictions for resource management is not new, they admit, because it is used in other countries. However the approach has "strong biophysical and economic logic"; to wit, the watershed management approach has "strong economic logic" because the "externalities involved with alternative land-management practices on an individual farm," for example are internalized if and when watershed is managed as a sole unit.
Watershed approaches can be integrated with or be part of programs that include soil, community development, farming practices, forestry and soil conservation, but there must be integrated planning and cooperation before a process can begin.
Problems arise in watershed management in many Asian countries, Dixon writes (p. 21); management activities are often "fragmented" between private and public entities. For example, the Ministry of Forestry might manage the upstream watershed activities and getting hands into the pie too will be the Ministry of Agriculture, the ministries of Irrigation, Energy and Public Works as well. Then you have private landowners, NGO groups that depend on water for their sustenance. And...
The case of the World Commission on Dams is a good example of how this tendency to centralize water resource management can be mitigated, if not completely eliminated. The political reality of the world is that government represents more than just laws and policies, just as management and governance has to be about more than just enacting laws and edicts, but should reflect the values of the community and the
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