In Australia, a Drought Spurs a Radical Remedy(Subscription)

....The drought's severity and impact are spurring Australia, the world's driest inhabited continent, to tackle a problem that also is starting to afflict more populous countries: how to survive with less water. Australian leaders spent decades building reservoir systems to try to turn vast expanses of marginal cropland in its harsh interior into an agricultural mecca. But recent years have brought record drought -- and predictions that climate changes from global warming could make Australia's interior even drier. That has the government looking to change course, while farmers protest that the droughts haven't gotten worse -- only the politics surrounding them. In the U.S., farmers and policy makers squabble over how to keep dwindling water resources like the Ogallala Aquifer from disappearing. In China, Beijing is struggling to keep the Yellow River -- known as the cradle of Chinese civilization -- from drying out. The Australian government's proposal to preserve its Murray-Darling river basin is one of the most far-reaching anywhere. It calls for taking over management of water rights from the local jurisdictions that share the basin, something akin to Washington taking over the Mississippi River. The government proposes buying out farmers from areas with too little water, and upgrading irrigation systems to reduce waste from leaching channels or leaking pipes. In all, the budget is $8.6 billion , a significant sum in a nation of only 20 million people. ....James Kahl doesn't doubt officials handed out too many water entitlements over the years, but he doesn't think the federal government will necessarily manage water any better. He says his family's first 20 years on the farm were unusually wet, and now, the area is probably coming to the end of a 20-year dry period. Driving across his property in a white SUV, he points out areas where huge floods swept across the farm's black fields in past years. Bureaucrats may ignore such cycles, he says, and simply push to drive farmers out. "There are people who really think we shouldn't make anything off these rivers," Mr. Kahl said one recent afternoon as white cockatoos squawked around him and emus gathered on his empty fields. They'd like "to let it all go back to kangaroos and wild pigs, and then the world will be a happy place."....