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ACROSS THE DITCH Dealing with NATURE���S EXTREMES BY JOHN MOSIG ���day Kiwi. How���s it going over on your side of The Ditch? I see you had our Lady Prime Minister and The First Bloke across for a bit of knees up down at Queenstown. They said they had a great time.They loved all that water. She reckons it would be better off over here, where we so badly need it. Wouldn���t take much to lay a pipeline across the Tasman, now would it? And think of the carbon-free power it would generate on its way out of the mountains. As well as providing clean water for the half of the population of New Zild that now call Orstraylya home, we could dump a bit of it on our bush���res. Which is really what I wanted to run past you this time around. My Good Lady is always telling me I���m all doom and gloom when it comes to the climate, how it���s becoming more extreme and what that means to the food security of the numerous societies dotted all over the Planet. Make that crammed in all over the Planet. But you wouldn���t have to be Einstein to work out that things aren���t what they used to be, and are becoming less so every year. Once in a hundred year ���oods are coming along every two or three years. Fire seasons from hell, with which we���ve had to deal with once a decade, are breaking out three times as often. How has this affected aquaculture here in the WideBrownLand? Well, for openers, it���s closed more than a few barramundi farms up North. Cyclones that can wreck the banana-growing industry push the price of the easy to peel fresh fruit-snack up around the $14/kg mark when they hit the plantations of the Deep North. And it���s not just the cage-based marine farms that cop it. Hatcheries, in which water quality and temperature control are critical to successful ovulation, spawning and incubation, are crucial seedstock suppliers to the growout sector, and have a lot of specialised infrastructure supporting their operation. They���re solidly built of course, but they���re not designed to have the roof ripped off and a meter or so of water poured into them. The Childers region is an important warmwater aquaculture region. The recent ���ooding that devastated Bundaberg put its share of pressure on the production plans of a few growers. The Black Saturday bush���res in the upper Goulburn nearly wiped out the Victorian rainbow trout industry. Some farms are just now getting back into production. Others are G The tradgedy is ponds of dead fish 12 ��� NZ AQUACULTURE ��� MARCH/APRIL 2013 Bush fires create smoke, heat and death still wondering if it���s worth the effort. Then there���s the environmental issue. As opposed to the climatic issue. Look up ���two-headed ���sh and Sunland��� on your preferred search engine and see what you come up with. I know the story well, and Dr Matt Landos too. There���s no doubt in my mind as to what has caused the problems at Gwen Gilson���s hatchery. If for no other reason than when she breeds ���sh on another property, one not susceptible to spray drift from a macadamia orchard, she has wonderful success with her Australian bass. So where am I going with all this? I was watching a report on the telly from the ���re regions and they were using terms that you would have heard in the headquarters of a military organisation. And it came to me that we���re at war with, not so much Nature, but the extreme forces of Nature. Forces, that our poor relationship with the environment may, or may not have unleashed, but forces with which, nevertheless, we���re going to have to deal. And here���s the theme: are we ready to deal with the impact of climate change and its extremities? As an industry and as a community? This of course raises more questions. For instance, what steps should we be taking? At what cost? Who covers the cost? And, how do we get the people who can help us answer these questions and meet the challenges to listen? Bananas at $14/kg didn���t worry anyone except mothers weaning babies onto mush. The rest of us just got used to a fruit bowl without bright yellow. And it was only a local sort of issue anyway. Twenty one million Australians don���t add up to much in the wider scheme of things. I���ve been in Malaysia when the authorities stepped in to peg the price of chillies when a shortage saw their market value jump by 50 percent in a week. Our neighbours told us of the dire straights their cousins in Mumbai found themselves in during a shortage of onions, and the social unrest that it stirred up. I wonder just how much food security/food safety* we have up our sleeve sometimes. But two things are for sure: it���s getting harder to produce with any sort of surety, and, the number of mouths to feed is growing by the day. * see: Professional Skipper Issue 91, p41