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Rain offers hope to Australian farmers
By Geoff Hiscock
SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- Scattered rain in southeast Australia has given farmers the first hint of better times in 2003 after the devastating drought of the past year. The rain, which fell Tuesday and Wednesday, is far from enough to save the desperate situation of many rural families, but will be welcome nonetheless. End of year celebrations in many parts of Australia, including Sydney and Melbourne, were marked by gusty winds and relatively heavy falls of rain. The Victorian town of Mildura and the New South Wales central western area near Dubbo had some of the heaviest falls of 50 millimeters (2 inches) or more on Tuesday night. But the Bureau of Meteorology said the falls were scattered and were not drought-breaking. The rain this week follows fierce storms which struck parts of the Australian east coast last week on Christmas Eve (December 24) and again on Boxing Day (December 26), when a heavy downpour marked the start of the Sydney-Hobart yacht race. The bureau's Victorian office said 2002 was the third driest year on record for Melbourne, beaten only by 1967 and 1997. It said most parts of the state registered annual totals that were among the driest 10 percent in history. Long-running drought
Much of Australia has been in the grip of a drought for the past 12 months, forcing farmers to slash the area they sow to crops and to trim their breeding herds of cattle and sheep. Scattered rain in early December did little more than ease the acute bushfire threat. This week's follow-up falls have settled the dust but much more is needed in the weeks ahead if the drought is not to become the worst on record for Australia. According to the national commodity forecaster ABARE, the drought is expected to trim economic growth by 0.75 percentage points in the year to next June, and will likely trim farm production by more than 20 percent or Aust. $8 billion ($4.5 billion). (Full story) The Bureau of Meteorology says rainfall odds for the next three months are evenly balanced at 50:50, with no strong swings towards wetter or drier conditions. In its three-month outlook released in December, the bureau said there were two exceptions to this prediction. They were a greater chance of below average falls in northeast Australia, and a greater chance of above average falls in parts of South Australia. It said the January-March period was when the impact from the El Nino weather pattern on Australian rainfall commonly broke down. But it stressed this was not a prediction of when the drought would break. It said that would take "several months" of sustained above-average falls in some areas. "In all likelihood, the breakdown will not occur uniformly across all drought affected areas," it noted. Lower grain harvestsAbout two-thirds of Australian farms are affected by the drought, with the summer gain crop harvest forecast by ABARE to fall 59 percent to 2 million tonnes. That follows a disappointing winter grain harvest of 16.2 million tonnes, down 21 million tonnes from the previous season. Grain storage and marketing company GrainCorp, which has terminals in Victoria and New South Wales, confirmed this week its winter grain intake would fall well short of last season, meaning some grain would have to be imported. Australia normally is the world's No. 2 wheat exporter, and a significant exporter of barley to China, Japan and the Middle East.
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