I would like to think that Australia’s national broadcaster would take-to-task an American who writes a best selling book that is full of factual errors that denigrate Australia. But instead our ABC just keeps giving him more time on radio to tell his tall tales.
Professor Jared Diamond got a great run on ABC radio last June when he was over here promoting his new book ‘Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive’. Then Robyn Williams ran him again on The Science Show a few months later and for a whole hour.
I complained and was given 15 minutes on Ockham’s Razor last November.
I have reviewed his chapter on Australia and shown it to be full of factual errors, click here for the published paper and I list some of the errors at the end of this blog post.
Michael Duffy invited Professor Diamond to debate me on Duffy’s ABC radio program Counterpoint a couple of weeks ago, but the professor declined.
So the ABC gave him a wad of time last Thursday night, again on a Robyn Williams program, In Conversation. Click here for the transcript.
While the program was billed as putting the professor on the spot – it was anything but a tough interview. Indeed Diamond was given more opportunity to tell more tall tales.
These included that unless we change our ways there won’t be any tropical rainforests left in Australia in 30 years time. That’s right – read the transcript!
He also thought it relevant to make the point that “Australia is the first-world country that has the smallest fraction of its land area covered by old-growth forest.” I thought we were also the driest continent on earth after the Antarctic so how relevant is that statistic? Should we turn our coastal rivers inland so that we can grow forest were there is now desert?
He goes on to state that Japan has a much larger percentage of its land mass as old growth forest. I would guess – and perhaps a reader of this blog might do the relevant calculations – that we have a much larger total area of old growth forest than Japan?
And I can’t believe the following claim but would like more information. He said in the interview last Thursday night that:
“Farmers are bringing pressure to bear on other farmers. Again on my last visit to Australia I had a very interesting time with a farmer in South Australia who was telling me that if a farmer who either leases land, or owns land outright is not taking good care of the land for example by over-stocking it, then local farmers put pressure on that farmer to change his or her practices. And in extreme cases my farmer-friend told me, if a farmer continues to abuse his or her land then even if you own it outright your land may be confiscated.”
Can anybody tell me as a comment below, or by separate email, whether there could be any truth in this claim that freehold land can be confiscated in South Australia?
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Just a few of the errors:
In the book the professor gets the price of wood chip wrong suggesting we sell it to Japan for US$7 per ton when official statistics show it sells for A$151 per tonne.
He indicates Australian farmers produce less food on a tonnes per hectare basis than most of the rest of the world, but doesn’t specify which crops. If we consider some of our major crops including cotton and rice – well Australian farmers harvest much more than the world average on a tonnes per hectare basis.
We produce on average 7 tonnes of rice per hectare in Australia while the world average is 4 tonnes/ha and Australian rice growers use 50 percent less water for every kilo of rice produced than the world average. In Australia the average yield for cotton is 1,672 tonnes/ha, while the world average is just 638 tonnes/ha – a lot less.
One of the reasons we manage to produce so more cotton per hectare is because our cotton is all irrigated. This is a reason why we don’t produce so much wheat per hectare. We grow a lot of wheat in Australia, but it is not irrigated, so our yields are low relative to much of the rest of the world.
In the book published by Penguin, Professor Diamond claims that, “it is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice concentrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees.” Yet official statistics show Australia exports almost three times the quantity of citrus it imports. During the 2003/04 financial year Australian producers exported navel and valencia oranges worth A$107 million.
Indeed, contrary to the impression give by the professor, Australia exports most of the food it produces with crop exports valued at A$13,269 million in 2003/04.
In ‘Collapse’ Diamond states that Australians are cutting down too many trees and as a consequence Australia’s forests will disappear long before our coal and iron reserves. Some forests have been clearfelled, some have been selectively logged, most have regrown. The area of forest is increasing, not reducing. The area of old growth forest protected nationally has increased from 1.2 million hectares to 3.8 millionh hectares since 1996. Tasmania has 43 percent of its total land are protected in reserves, including 82 percent of its rainforest.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
That’s why the ABC ought to be sold off or closed down.
It’s anti-Australian sucking on the public teat.
Jennifer, that farmer was have a big lend of Diamond, I bet when he turns up all the prices go up, $10 a beer.. .. . ..
There is absolutely no way anybody can ‘confiscate’ freehold land, land can be forcibly sold to met a debt incurred by the owner but that would be through the legal process.
SARDI and PIRSA have to put together a risk mimimisation management package for farmers. The object is to use weather predictors to avoid loss of resources. Its a big download so here is an extract;
Introduction
The 2002/03 drought was a 1 in 25 year event for most across South Australia. Its economical impacts were most devastating in regions where annual average rainfall is less than 350mm. At the end of 2002, SA cereal producers still managed to deliver 60% of the 5-year average of wheat to the grain silos. However 80% of this was delivered by 20% of the growers. Livestock managers in low-rainfall areas reduced their stock numbers to the lowest since 1927, due to lack of feed. High-rainfall livestock managers kept all available fodder in case they needed it for themselves.
Where land was not managed for a pending drought, in low rainfall cereal regions, substantial topsoil was swept away by strong winds. In livestock regions, some managers left de-stocking until their land became overgrazed, resulting in soil drift and a reduction in plant species biodiversity.
The SA Research and Development Institute (SARDI) Climate Risk Management Unit (CRMU) interpreted information from forecasters and provided property and regionally specific forecasts and workshops, before, during and after the 2002 growing season. The information provided integrated outputs from the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), WA Department of Agriculture (WADA), SARDI, Queensland Department of Primary Industries (QDPI), and CSIRO.
The Premiers Task Force responded to the drought once it had hit by making $5 million available for drought assistance measures. A network of the SARDI CRMU, Primary Industries and Resources SA (PIRSA), SA Farmers Federation, private consultants, Agricultural Bureaus, Regional Health Services and Industry Bodies responded by delivering many workshops, media articles, fodder registers, books and web sites. Follow up assistance during 2003 continues with this network.
(cut)
Conclusions
The 20% of growers that produced 80% of the crop during 2002 made good profits in the drought. The other 80% of producers (also similar trends in livestock industries), did not produce good profits.
Some of these producers did have access to seasonal forecast information. Those that understood it responded well. For example, high rainfall producers managed to make a profit, while low rainfall producers cut their losses.
Some producers did not respond at all. These producers might lack long-term exposure to this sort of information and confidence in using it. These producers may have made a substantial loss both economically and biologically. Survey results from workshops and forecast services suggest that the longer farmers are exposed to climate information the more they will have confidence in responding.
Recommendations
Integrated use of delivery techniques is essential. This includes workshops, individual forecasts, media and web sites. It is also important to tailor information to the end users and sufferers of drought and climate extremes. The information needs to be clearly written and presented in the end-user’s language.
An integrated use of information is also essential, and we have found that looking at seasonal forecasts along with seasonal conditions on individual properties provides the best trigger points to responding with management techniques.
Links to networks are essential in getting information out to end users, such as agronomists and farming networks. Existing networks in SA responded well to drought in SA when utilising the Premier’s Drought Assistance Package. SARDI CRMU provides a central base that interprets information from its own research, and other providers and delivers it to users. SARDI commercialised its forecast service in 2003. The SARDI CMRU is now tailoring forecasts for various enterprises.
Specific climate risk management champions that interpret climate information to the end user are another key to success. These champions should also be aware of the timing of delivery of this information.
When tailoring information, forecasters and information providers should keep in mind how flexible the end-user is in his management. How important is the forecast? Is it going to affect a major economical decision, or just a clothing decision?
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/droughtcom/droughtcom_abstracts.pdf#52
“Australia .. has the smallest fraction of its land area covered by old-growth forest.. also the driest continent .. so how relevant is that statistic?”
Reasonable point. It’s more instructive to ask what percentage Australia’s remaining old-growth forest is of original forest. What is it? (Overall, and by major forest types?)
About “farmer pressure,”
I can add a bit in response to the open invitation to comment. In my neck of the woods there’s a farmer who leases land aggressively. He has a few acres of his own, but primarily what he owns is farm machinery. He has for decades been accused of every form of land abuse you can imagine and at the same time become one of the richest farmers around here. And he has become a social pariah. I’ve met him, and he strikes me as a nice guy. So yes, there is “farmer pressure” over leasing vs. owning and “land abuse,” but I suspect there may be more than a bit of envy going on. This is just an anecdote, though, just like Diamond’s anecdote. Something about these anecdotes *might* be generalizable, but that’s far from claiming to have hard evidence.
Schiller.
You could wonder why a Professor of geography and environmental health sciences at the University of California resorts to having to make use of anecdotal evidence from anonymous sources to support his scenarios.
He also says that beef should not be grown in the inland as it was unprofitable and should be confined to the coast. Obviously he was again advised by his “farmer” friend who must have stakes in a feedlot as the cost of real estate on the coast would be prohibitive for cattle.
Traditionally the coast was dairy and the heifer calves would be sold on to inland graziers.
One group of inland cattle growers is OBE Beef http://www.obebeef.com.au who run over seven million hectares in the channel country.
Austrade are happy to promote the OBE product http://www.austrade.gov.au/corporate/layout/0,,0_S1-1_-2_-3_PWB110706431-4_-5_-6_-7_,00.html
Perhaps Diamond could define how much profit he has made out of critiquing how others live.
The following information came in by email from South Australia in response to my question about government being able to confiscate freehold land in SA:
“It is the case that the pastoral board has some ability to revoke overgrazed pastoral leases. I cannot remember them actually doing so but they have threatened.
Freehold land, on the other hand is subject to vegetation clearance laws and EPA laws but not to confiscation, except for building roads etc under compulsory acquisition.”
And I ask, given the extent of the misinformation in the prerecorded interview, why did Robyn Williams play it?
The SA pastoral lease act is here; http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/sa/consol_act/plmaca1989384/
Conditions of lease are here;
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/sa/consol_act/plmaca1989384/s22.html
In particular the Act states that
“(5) A condition of a pastoral lease is, to the extent that it relates to the minimum stocking rate of pastoral land, void and of no effect.
(6) The Board may, at the request or with the consent of the lessee—
(a) approve the pasturing (as part of the commercial enterprise under the lease) of a species of animal other than a species specified in the lease; and
(b) approve a level of stock on the land, or on a particular part of the land, in excess of the maximum levels specified in the lease; and..”
So there is potential for a farmer to lose his lease if he both understocked and/or overstocked..
Pastoral leases are monitored by a “Pastoral Lease Assessment Program has completed the first round of property based condition assessment, establishing vegetation and soil monitoring points in every paddock of every pastoral property in the last 14 years, representing about 40% of the State.
http://www.environment.sa.gov.au/reporting/biodiversity/nativeveg.html
Posting for Dirk:
“I tried to post a comment on your blog, but it was knocked back because of ‘questionable content’. I’m not sure what was questionable about it, so I’ll copy it here ..
I’ve been dipping into this book over the last few months and have gotten about halfway through the chapter about Australia. A lot of it didn’t ring true to me and I thank you for your intellectual rigor in pointing out the errors. However, I feel compelled to point out a minor flaw in your post:
you state that all cotton grown in Australia is irrigated. This is not true.
It varies from year to year according to the weather, but only about 80% of the Australian crop is irrigated, which would explain the low yield average.
(In ten years in the cotton industry, the crops I have worked on have yielded roughly 1.93 tonne/ha. These were very close to the district
averages.) Further to the high yield, Australian quality from year to year is more consistent- and consistently higher- than world averages.”
Dirk Thruster at February 26, 2006 06:04 PM
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Thanks for the comment Dirk. You are correct my post should have read “most” not “all” of the cotton in Australia is irrigated.
But I am a bit confused by your comment that yields are low. In my review of the chapter (link above) I show yields for cotton for a heap of countries and we were right up there. What is your point of comparison?
More from Dirk:
“Oops, I did it again. More ‘questionable content’. Nevermind. Here’s my
response:
Previewing your Comment
I was comparing the industry average with the average of crops I have worked on and, to a lesser extent, the crops in the districts I was in at the time.
I have been fortunate enough to have worked for some very efficient farmers, but (with one major exception) their yield averages were only slightly above the district average. I have experience in the Gwydir Valley, the Dawson Valley, the Border Rivers region and am currently in the Dirranbandi district. At the time I was in them, all of these ditricts, bar the Dawson Valley, had yield averages higher than the average you quote for the industry.
Posted by Dirk Thruster at February 26
Cheers again,
Dirk”
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Sorry about the ‘questionable content’ problem that prevents comments being posted sometimes. Thanks for sending me the comment to post, anyway.
Thinksy
I’m confused by this: “It’s more instructive to ask what percentage Australia’s remaining old-growth forest is of original forest.” I get confused easily. I actually don’t have statistics about how much remaining forest is old growth, if that is the question. I think the answer in many forests depends upon: how long after regeneration does a forest become old growth once more? If you have just taken your blood pressure medication, go see my recent comment at “How much forest should be saved?”.
Another factor which confuses the statistics is that much of our forest and woodland has been converted to farmland (I eat too, this is not farmer bashing) and when it suits the opponents of forestry to do so, this converted land area is included in the area of forest that has been logged. The implication is often made that forestry is responsible for the cleared land as well as the logged forest.
I think in the community’s mind, it is much easier to accept farming because our need for food is so tangible and most people don’t realise how much wood fibre they use. However this is a slippery slope for agriculture and I would not like to see agriculture put through the same hysterical process that forestry continues to experience. Too much foam around the lips and not enough thought.
I think if Diamond was to be consistent, he would need to argue that farming is unacceptable anywhere on the planet and we should eat berries from the forest and hunt bison from native grasslands. He tends to ignore the fact that the carrying capacity of Australia in the pre-European period was about half a million people.
Regarding forestation,
Here in the US we suffer heaps of scorn over deforestation. It’s an accomplished fact that we now have more forest than when the first Europeans arrived. (I’m not counting the Vikings, etc.) So some of that “new” forestation isn’t entirely “natural” and some would say that makes them “new growth” and may insist they’re “new growth” no matter how old they get.
Then there’s another fact that’s so politically incorrect that people fear repeating it: most of the Great Plains of the Central US would be forest, and “old growth” forest at that, except for the Native Americans (Immigrants themselves, originally.) These Native Americans instituted the practice of setting massive grass fires in the spring each year, to keep trees off the plains so that they could be used, essentially, as pasture for buffalo.
So–the notions of “old,” “new,” “native” and “natural” are not terribly clear in this context.
As to the notion of Jared Diamond telling farmers where they ought to go: well, if it was a good idea, the farmers would already be there.
I have to wonder if the success of “Guns, Germs and Steel” left Diamond so impressed with himself that he feels endowed with oracular powers and, hence, a responsibility to tell others their own business.
Schiller.
I agree Schiller, the distinctions between old new and native in vegetation types are mostly a question of when European colonisation took place. Perhaps this is why Europeans are a bit more pragmatic about this topic; nothing in northern European goes back further than the last ice age and they weren’t colonised by Europeans in the same way the new world was.
I actually admire the Guns Germs and Steel argument, but yes, Diamond seems to be getting a bit over-excited in recent times.
To rephrase the question: out of the forest cover that existed in Australia (pre-Europeans if that’s a convenient yardstick), how much is left largely undisturbed?
From memory, I read (in a international article) that it’s 3% – 5% depending on choice of parameters. Re: regrowth, again from memory: an old-growth forest state can take 600-1000 years to reach.
***Is there no good reason at all to conserve/protect the remaining old-growth forests in Aust? Should we just log it all?***
As it’s practised today, is Australian forestry sustainable – and how can we be sure if it takes 65-80 years for regrowth?
Re: Asia – If Australia logged 100% of its forest area, would that stop Asian deforestation, or are there additional factors at play in Asia (eg: palm plantations)?
You must have a good memory Thinksy, the Australian bush has been “disturbed” for tens of thousands of years.
Thinksy
Undisturbed forest – I don’t know. It’s one of those statistics that can be turned to your advantage whatever your perspective. To me, it makes more sense to consider each forest type individually. Eg, if you clear a vast area of wheatbelt land to grow food (a million acres a year!), then the total area of native vegetation may be significantly reduced. Meantime, a tall forest type x that is not cleared (because it’s not land desired for broadacre farming) may be largely undisturbed. It makes little sense to treat the tall forest type x according to the situation that has developed in the wheatbelt region.
Old growth forest is a poorly defined concept in my opinion. When a search was made for the oldest jarrah in SW of WA, the oldest tree was a bit over 300 years old. This is a relatively slow-growing forest where the strategy is survival of the individual. In forests like mountain ash, where the strategy is to produce millions of saplings, grow like mad and more than 95% of the trees die before they reach maturity, the chances of finding trees older than jarrah seems unlikely. People have used the diameter of trees to imply an age; big trees are older. This is comprehensively wrong in many, if not all, cases because the biggest trees are the biggest because they have grown several times faster than their neighbours. So 600+ years seems way too long for any forest that grows fast enough to be considered a commercial resource. Also worth noting that not one species has been recorded as being driven to extinction by logging in Australia.
For the purposes of a concise argument elsewhere I suggested that a whole forest could be logged if the rotation was long enough. This is an oversimplification. I think it would be much better to debate how much forest needs to be preserved to ensure no loss of biodiversity (and it should be possible to quantify this) than to have the current debate which is just both sides saying “we want more” and “youse guys are all wankers”.
There are many many Aus forests that have been regenerated since the 19th century. I think any of the forests that are hotly debated today (these are all tall and usually smooth barked species) would have numerous examples of regen spread across the last 100 years.
Stopping Asian deforestation. There are more factors than our consumption, including other nations’ imports and clearing for oil palms etc. But wood is a globally traded commodity. If you take more from the global resource than you are growing as a nation, then you must be depleting someone else’s forest, even you import all your wood from NZ plantations (which are grown on land that used to support tall native forest). As a net wood importer, while we lock up more and more Australian resources for our sense of well being, we are making up the deficit directly from the global resourse. I heard a WWF guy on the ABC say today that we are the biggest individual market for PNG sawn wood. So if we grew all our own wood, other countries would continue to use the rainforests. But at the moment we are following the feeding frenzy strategy. Keep our resource under the bed and use as much as possible of others nations’ forests before those forests are all gone. If we don’t rip ’em off, someone else will. I would bet London to a brick that we will be condemned for this in the future as a greedy first world nation. Which, when you look at it, we are.
I also don’t have much time for the argument that they’re going to clear this forest anyway, so we may as well buy the wood. The sale of the wood probably pays for the clearing. Analogy – the sale of the hide from a cow pays for the act of slaughtering of the cow, so vegetarians should not use any leather, even if they don’t eat the meat which is the principal product.
On fires and forests again:
Does anyone have experience with the role that small mammals and other small organisms play in minimising fuel loads (before their numbers generally declined)?
It’s sad that some LDC forests are cleared (for agriculture) and the wood wasted. eg giant Amazonian trees smoldering for ages.
Boxer if we pursue a strategy of only consuming the amount of wood that we produce nationally (or regionally), then it’s an argument for national self-sufficiency that goes against the whole premise of free markets and international trade according to comparitive advantage. We already wear accusations of being a greedy nation and I don’t doubt that we will attract further criticism for this.
Meanwhile, international trade continues (and objections to further logging in Aust continue). Would the best strategy be ethically based trade in certified sustainable wood only? ie widespread (international) adoption of FSC, not just voluntary fringe action by some NGO’s, some businesses and some individuals.
Thinksy, I don’t think we have to consume only our own wood, so trade can be both ways across borders. It would be desirable to balance the trade at first, and then perhaps help take some of the global pressure off the developing nations. It’s complex: the rainforest wood is cheaper than anyone else’s and we have to achieve a balance where the developing nations can utilise their forest resource sustainably to generate income for their countries perpetually. It’s the “rip ’em off” mentallity that we have at the moment that offends me most. We aren’t personally and conciously trying to do this, but most people are trying hard to look the other way.
I have this scenario in my imagination when, in AD 2063, the last SE Asian rainforest is lost, and orang utans are only found in zoos. The world will look around to see where all that wood went. Australia will be standing quietly in the background, with vast areas of forest locked up in the 1990s and 2000s, much of it approaching its period of senescence, and a long history of living off other people’s wood. We’ll point to China of course, but our per capita consumption will possibly be high by world standards. Yes, we’re accused of greed on many counts, but if forests are still an iconic green issue in 2063, we will deserve whatever we get when the reckoning is made.
I don’t mind what the mechanisms are, but they have to operate within a real market. Before you get to mechanisms, you have to develop a national ethos that allows a realistic mechanism to be developed, and that mechanism means we will have to compromise on our desire to save every tall smooth-barked tree we can (but only in Aus). The RFAs were meant to do this, but the greens refused to be involved in this process and then worked furiously to destroy the Agreements once they were drawn up. In WA, this was very successful for the greens and the RFA lasted only a few months before the industry was decimated due to public anxiety whipped up by a campaign run with the full support of the local daily newspaper (which, as many people have observed, is printed on paper).
Good points, Boxer. The issue of sustainability certification is also not a simple one, especially in the third world. For in those cases the only people who are likely to get the certification are the cronies and the generals who have been given “concessions” over the forests of local communities.
These “concessions” are frequently mistaken by foreign observers to be “legal logging” while the local communities who try to continue with their traditional use of the forest are regarded as “poachers” and “illegal loggers”.
In legal terms, the local communities should have a right to maintain their ‘existing use rights’ as an express provision of the Montreal Protocol, without need for any sort of development approval or permit process. But when these rights are assumed to be non-existent then the so-called permit held by the General is seen as the primary instrument in law.
And clearly, all the damage is being inflicted by the large scale ‘legal logging’ while the small scale, repairable impact, harvesting is done by the ‘poachers’.
And all the international certification schemes succeed in doing is impose a whole new layer of opportunity to extract baksheesh from the disadvantaged communities.
And it is quite interesting to note that the European greens have fully supported the certification of wood from their own native forests and their consumers actually prefer their wood to come from native forest instead of plantations.
Indeed, the distinction between plantation and native forest is not very clear because one of the most effective ways to establish a forest on cleared land is to plant a small number of trees of different species and then wait for them to bear seed and regenerate a regrowth forest. This way nature makes the choice of which species goes best in which spot. It has worked very well on my place.
But here in Australia, the greens have fought tooth and nail to try and deny certification to all forest types that are not plantation.
To those of us who have always taken the view that ‘how you get there is what the journey is all about’ it is pure lunacy.
Thinksy
Comment at a previous blog post from Christine Jones about small mammals:
“The open, park-like appearance of many areas at the time of European settlement has often been attributed to indigenous burning regimes. More recent evidence suggests that the healthy grasslands and friable soils described by the first settlers were more likely to have reflected the high abundance of small native mammals, such as bettongs and potoroos most of which are now locally extinct .. with the loss of the regenerative effects of small native mammals in Australia since European settlement, managed grazing is now arguably the only natural means by which grasslands can be ‘improved’ in a holitistic way.”
see http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/000828.html
The whole issue of “sustainable logging” and “legal lumber” has become totally polluted by extortionate activist groups who launch protests and then receive royalties in exchange for the “green” certification. I.e., we won’t mess up your business if you pay off. Nice racket but criminal syndicates invented the idea first.
As far as the impact of “small mammals,” well, we are small mammals, too. Now as everyone familiar with mammalian behavior knows, these critters avoid fouling their nest. My guess is, humans got plenty of that mammal behavior and exert themselves to the limit of their intelligence to keep their nest a nice place.
We’re nesting on this planet, and want to keep it a nice place, and maybe some want to complain about human nesting habits, but hey, there’s nobody else around to give us potty-training. We’re as good as we are and that’s it.
Schiller.
Thanks for the info and link Jennifer, that’s really interesting.
Ian, if Jennifer agrees, it would be interesting to read a guest post by you on your land and forestry practices. ie a short case study/story: a bit of the history, perhaps a photo or 2 to illustrate your points about how (and how not) to manage the land, the trees and native habitat in your neck of the woods, and what you think is the solution to the cluster of forest-related issues.