IT SEEMS pretty simple: taking water away from farmers means cutting food and fibre production. But not necessarily. Behind the fierce political rhetoric there is a more sober assessment going on, of the choices facing farmers and downstream processors in a vast foodbowl that accounts for 40 per cent of this country's agricultural production.
With global food security ever higher on the political agenda, the potential impact of the draft Murray-Darling Basin plan on food production is a hot-button issue.
Australian Food and Grocery Council chief executive Kate Carnell was pressing that button hard this week, saying a reduction in water availability would push up water prices, make Australian foods less competitive and make us more reliant on imports.
''Australia exports quite a lot of bulk commodity foods, like wheat,'' she said. ''A lot of the food produced by irrigators [in the basin] is not for export. It's fruit and vegetables that we eat fresh or process here, for Australian consumption.
''If we don't produce it here, we're going to have to import it. I'm not sure the environment is a great winner if we import more food from south-east Asia and China.''
The draft basin plan, released this week, proposes to recover 2750 gigalitres of water per year, now used for human consumption or farming, and use it to restore the health of the river system.
The Murray-Darling Basin Authority estimates this will reduce the value of irrigated agricultural production in the basin by 9 per cent, spread out over the rest of the decade.
A lot of water has already been recovered, however - including through $1.5 billion spent so far on buybacks under the Water for the Future program - so the estimated reduction in irrigated production is only 5 per cent.
Irrigated production accounts for about 40 per cent of all agriculture in the basin and only about 2 per cent of agricultural land use (the rest is dry-land farming).
So the total reduction in the value of agricultural production from the basin from here on in would be only 2 per cent, according to the government's figures.
Undoubtedly, that still hurts. As New South Wales Irrigators Council chief executive Andrew Gregson told The Age: ''We're talking about the closure of family farms. You will see upward pressure on food prices. You will see a number of towns in serious decline.''
What's harder to determine is just which crops will decline in production, which food manufacturers will close, which towns will feel the brunt of the impact.
Most are saying that, for all its hundreds of pages and supporting documentation, the draft basin plan leaves much up in the air - too much to really determine who is in the firing line.
Gregson says one of the plan's ''great failings is you can't tell which commodities are affected''. Carnell concedes downstream food processors are by and large keeping their heads down about the likely impact on their operations - partly for fear of unsettling their employees, and partly because the detailed work has not been done, to determine who is most exposed.
On its own, she says, water isn't ''front and centre'' for food processors. With a high dollar and the supermarket wars, she says, ''it's just another issue on top of all others''.
For farmers, a lot hangs on how much water is bought back for the environment, versus how much is recovered for consumptive uses via investment in improved water efficiency and productivity.
Of the target 2750 gigalitres of water to be recovered, 1268 gigalitres is already contracted or will come from the Water for the Future program, the New South Wales RiverBank program and stages one and two of the Northern Victoria Irrigation Renewal Project. Another 400 gigalitres could be recovered through investment in water-saving infrastructure, according to the government.
This leaves about 1050 gigalitres of water up in the air, to be recovered through ''other measures''. Much of that will come from buybacks at the rate of 150 gigalitres a year but the buyback program has been suspended since the floods and the government has flagged that the volume of future water purchases ''could be reduced further should environmental water needs be able to be met more efficiently''.
Les Gordon, president of the Ricegrowers Association, says if the government recovers water through efficiency and productivity gains ''then we hope the impact on food production would be less than if they buy outright''.
Gordon, who grows rice at Barham on the Murray River, says there is not a straight line connection between water reductions and food production. Impacts will be localised. More profitable farmers will be in a better position to trade water, albeit at higher prices.
Locally relevant ''tipping points'' are going to have an impact on food production, he says. If there's not enough food to support a canning factory or processing plant, it will have to shut.
Victoria-based fruit-packer SPC Ardmona, based in Shepparton and now owned by Coca-Cola Amatil, says it is continually seeking ways to reduce its water and energy use.
In a statement this week, managing director Vince Pinneri said SPC did not believe the draft basin plan would have a significant or unmanageable impact on its growers, or on the company's manufacturing operations.
A similar cautious response came from Bega Cheese, which employs 700 people in northern Victoria through 70 per cent-owned Tatura Milk Industries.
Executive chairman Barry Irvin said Bega had been investing in the region since 2007, focusing increasingly on value-added products such as cream cheese and nutritional infant formulas.
The main challenge for Bega is how the draft plan will affect milk supplies, but Irvin says the region's dairy farmers are ''very resilient''.
Irvin says those farmers he had spoken to this week are ''very comfortable'' they could meet their commitments on water efficiency and productivity, but hope water buybacks will remain suspended until at least 2013.
The water buyback program is roughly halfway through. Economists argue that buybacks are often the cheapest form of water recovery.
But Liz Mann, industry development manager with the Australian Processing Tomato Research Council, says buybacks are ''only cheaper in the short-term. Then food production goes offshore. We can't produce food any cheaper.''
Mann says there is huge potential to increase yields while reducing water use. In northern Victoria, she says, tomato growers have increased yields by up to 30 per cent by improving on-farm irrigation.
They are not a focus of the debate yet, but besides the potential for more efficient farming - and a switch to less water-intensive crops - there are also longer-term benefits to agriculture from the restoration of the healthy river system.
For now, however, the focus is on water recovery. Bruce Simpson, spokesman for the Murray Group of Concerned Communities, says the region's rice growers are facing a halving in the volume of productive water they are allocated and fears ''rice will be priced out of the market''.
The perception that water-intensive crops such as irrigated rice and cotton are the problem is ''very simplistic and very dangerous'', he says.
Because they are annual crops - only planted when water is available - they put less demand on the river system than permanent plantings - grape vines, citrus trees - which demand water every year.
A lot of this horticulture is at the bottom of the basin, he says, and requires most water in summer, ''right when the river wouldn't normally be trying to transmit such high volumes''.
Simpson says the long-term trend in growth in agricultural productivity is about 2.5 per cent a year.
''If we can maintain productivity, we can ameliorate the exodus of water. Structural adjustment is a very poor second. It's not what we want,'' he says.
''Rural people are conservative people, but they're used to change. We've already lost 1100 gigalitres.
''It's relentless and never-ending and communities are starting to wilt.''
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