RickInOz

Sorry but this is going to be another post about the parlous situation in Adelaide during the current heatwave. Do bear with me though, as it does have an important point to make.

For anyone who follows international news regularly, the sight of empty supermarket shelves will be a regular feature. They usually accompany the latest tale of woe from the stricken Zimbabwe. A country that once fed most of sub-Saharan Africa has now become one of the most aid-dependent countries in the world. Through a combination of poor economic and political management and drought, normally reliable harvests have failed to materialise.

You would therefore be reasonably surprised  if I said this actually occurred in Adelaide. Last Thursday I went shopping and was shocked to find many empty shelves. The culprits are two-fold. Firstly the recent hot weather has over-stretched the electricity grid with high demands from air-conditioning units running night and day. Secondly the interminable drought is making farming increasingly difficult and unprofitable. The result of the electricity spikes was a series of rolling blackouts deliberately staged to maintain supplies to vital services such as the airport and hospitals. Unfortunately our usual supermarket was in an area deemed “non-essential” and after 12 hours without power the freezer and chiller compartments couldn’t maintain temperature resulting in thousands of dollars of spoiled food. And that wasn’t the only supermarket affected. A number of others were also affected with the knock-on effect of lost income and disappointed customers. This comes on top of the existing strained supply lines from diminishing dairy and grain production.

By now the purpose of this post should be obvious. We take food and it’s availability for granted and have become complacent. The same can be said about fresh drinking water, and I confidently predict that it will be a shortage of this, and not crude oil, that will be mankind’s greatest challenge in the next couple of decades. The current problem should be a rude wake-up call to the state government and prompt some urgent action before South Australia turns into a barren, uninhabitable dustbowl …. like Zimbabwe.