Australia buys huge farm
to save dying river

CANBERRA - An irrigation farm larger than Singapore and sucking up billions of liters of water each year has been bought by Australia's government to help save one of the country's most vital rivers from a slow death and climate change.

Toorale Station, a cotton farm covering 910 sq km (351 sq miles) in the west of New South Wales state, was sold to the national and state governments for almost US$19 million, one day before it was set to go to auction.

The purchase will allow 20 gigaliters - equivalent to 20,000 Olympic swimming pools - to be returned each year to the ailing Darling River, which is one of two streams flowing through the Murray-Darling basin, home to almost half the nation's farms.

"Returning this water to the Darling will begin to turn around the long-term decline of this once great river," Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said on Thursday.

The Toorale Station is a historic grazing and cropping property on the junction of the Darling and Warrego Rivers, near Gundabooka National Park and the town of Bourke.

But large irrigation farms, some capable of using more water than contained in Sydney Harbor, are accused of exacerbating a long-running drought that has already wiped more than A$20 billion ($16 billion) from the A$1 trillion economy since 2002.

The Murray-Darling basin, an area the size of France and Germany, accounts for 41 percent of Australia's agriculture and provides A$21 billion worth of farm exports to Asia and the Middle East.

Wong, whose center-left government has begun a A$3 billion buy-back of farm licenses to release more water back into rivers, said Toorale would become parkland, but its water alone would not save critically endangered lakes downstream in South Australia state.