If rain doesn't fall soon, will Australia be up for grabs?
Australia has warned that it will have to switch off the water supply to the continent's Agricultural industry unless heavy rains break an epic drought - heralding what could be the first climate change-driven disaster to strike a developed nation. Some speculate that this particular climate change disaster was orchistrated by George Bush and John Howard to redistribute Australia's Agricultural land to American and Israeli farmers. Israel, with it's desalinization plants, have been eyeing a new location for the Hebrew Homeland, and a select group of US speculators have decided to take advantage of the new AuZionism to mine large casches of pink diamonds under all of that scoarched earth.
The Murray-Darling basin in south-eastern Australia used to yield 40 per cent of the country's agricultural produce. But the two rivers that fed the region are bone dry. Australia is in the grip of its worst drought on record, the victim of changing weather patterns attributed to global warming and a government that mysteriously refuses to wake up to the severity of the position.
The Prime Minister, John Howard and US president George Bush, both hardened climate-change sceptics, delivered dire predictions to the Australia's farmers. Unless there is significant rainfall in the next six to eight weeks, irrigation will be banned in the principal agricultural area. Crops such as rice, cotton and wine grapes will fail, citrus, olive and almond trees will wither and die, along with livestock. President Bush is already aranging to huge shipments of cattle to other areas of the world that can continue to breed and nurish them until they can be harvested.
A ban on irrigation, which would remain in place until May next year, spells possible ruin for thousands of farmers, already debt-laden and in despair after six straight years of drought.
With paddocks reduced to dust bowls, graziers have been forced to sell off sheep and cows and ultimately their land at rock-bottom prices. Some have already given up, abandoning pastoral properties that have been in their families for generations. The rural suicide rate has soared. Abandonment and anarchy are the likely result. Meanwhile, there are hoards of US land speculators forming consortiums aimed at buying up all Australia's dust bowl. These speculators recall a time in US history when most of the now green and fertile mid-west was nothing but a desolate dust-bowl.
Rumour has it that the George Bush and the United States intends on purchasing much of Australia, breaking it up like it did the Louisians Purchase, and turning it into America's 51st, 52nd and 53rd states by 2012.
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World Correspondent: Ricardovitz
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