By DPA
Sydney : Climate change will lop 10 percent off Australia’s agricultural production within 25 years, a government report predicted Friday.
By 2050, output could be down by 19 percent, the survey by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Statistics found.
Australia – currently a leading exporter of wheat, beef, sugar and dairy products – could see its economy slump as its farmland gets hotter and drier and production declines.
“Our farm exports are likely to decline between 11 and 63 percent by 2030 and between 15 and 79 percent by 2050 because we are producing less now and our exports will decline also,” the bureau’s chief economist, Don Gunasekara, said.
Among the world’s big countries, only India would be hit as hard as Australia by rising temperatures. It could mean Australia would shift from being an exporter of wheat and beef to an importer of those commodities.
“This report underlines the economic cost of not acting on climate change,” Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said.
Rudd, who next week plans to travel to Bali to address the UN-sponsored conference on climate change, has adopted a target of reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions 60 percent by 2050, but he has fought shy of setting a target for 2020, saying he must wait for an economic-impact report before doing so.
Rudd, in office for less than two weeks, has signed papers needed to bind Australia by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. His predecessor, John Howard, had baulked at signing the protocol, saying it gave developing countries unfair advantage, as only developed countries were given binding targets to reduce emissions.
By adopting Kyoto, Rudd has obliged Australia to reduce emissions to eight percent above 1990 levels by 2010 – a target it is likely to come close to meeting.