Being of the same vintage as your interviewees Bob Caldwell and Geoff Pendlebury of Country News (January 18), I too can remember the drought of 1938, the flood of 1939 and the disastrous droughts and dust storms of the '40s, but their conclusion that rising temperatures and a prolonged drought is cyclical and that climate change is a bit of a myth is opposite to that of 99 per cent of world scientists who have demonstrated incontrovertibly, to my mind, that mankind is facing a potential disaster.

I would suggest that these two gentlemen should read Australian of the Year Professor Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers, which is an unbiased view of meteorological events and man's contribution to rising greenhouse gas levels.

Bob and Geoff would recall that when they went to primary school the population of China and India was about one-third of that of today.

To put it plainly, the population in those countries has almost trebled in only 70 years. Such a situation cannot continue without a genuine threat to mankind's very existence.

Of course, there is an answer to the problems confronting us, but whether we are willing and/or are able to meet this challenge is very, very doubtful.

Solar, wind, tidal and wave energy all offer pollution-free alternatives to fossil-based fuel sources with their resultant rises in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.

We all know that carbon dioxide is an essential part of the human, plant and animal environment but there is a limit to this level - a level that we are now approaching dangerously.

Finally, population control is vital if human existence is to continue in its present form and/or with less poverty, disease and abject suffering.

Ern Miles

Kyabram

The ministers for misinformation

As each week goes by, more serious revelations surface on the alarming waste and misuse of public monies (over $1 billion) on the pipeline of panic, the hated north-south pipeline.

These revelations demonstrate ministerial incompetence of the highest order.

This month, we have been told that Melbourne does not need the water from the North-South Pipeline (Peter Ker, The Age).

Now, we hear, there is not the capacity to store the water in Sugarloaf Reservoir (Melissa Fyfe, The Sunday Age).

Yet the environment is crying out for water in the north.

A blue-green algae outbreak currently near Shepparton has the potential to threaten the drinking water for humans and animals in the Goulburn Valley.

Further, food producers as only receiving 55 per cent of their water right and are still expected to pay for 100 per cent.

Where Brumby and Holding have disgracefully tried to divide urban and country Victorians over water, there is one thing all Victorian have in common: we will all be paying for their stupidity, arrogance, incompetence and waste for years to come.

Sack them, and plug the pipe now.

Mike Dalmau

Acheron

Great deal: sell the water, keep the costs

Congratulations to Murray Haw on his letter of facts facing Goulburn irrigators (Country News, January 18).

He elaborated on the fact of irrigators paying for water not allocated, but held in storage. In other words, Goulburn-Murray Water has a "dregs for farmers" allocation policy, but a policy of farmers paying G-MW's operation costs, rumoured to rise a further 17 per cent next season.

He could have gone further and elaborated on the fact that the governments, including local, state and federal, are buying water entitlements from droughtstricken farmers and leaving those farmers to still keep paying the water rates for the water they have sold.

The question has to be asked: when G-MW altered its fees charged to farmers, from a water rate to a property land rate, was it colluding with the bureaucrats drawing up the National Water Plan?

This plan transfers the ownership of water entitlements for purposes other than farming, but the cost of operating G-MW did not move with the water entitlement, but remained with the farmer who sold it.

John Brian

Tongala

GGA members to vote on big changes

On February 18, Grain Growers Association will hold its 51st annual general meeting in Albury, NSW at Albury Performing Arts Centre, commencing at 10 am.

This year, GGA members are being asked to vote and support two very important special resolutions that will see changes to the GGA constitution and therefore the way GGA operates within the Australian agricultural sector.

Over the past 12 months GGA purchased two companies, BRI Australia and Agrecon, and merged with Kondinin Group, creating a group of companies with expertise covering farm technology testing and assessment, publishing, agricultural engineering, geospatial data gathering and analysis, grain and food industry science.

With this platform GGA is now positioning to develop as a leading industry services business.

In light of these changes, the board is seeking members' approval to make two key strategic constitutional changes at the upcoming AGM.

The first change is to allow for the appointment of up to two nongrower directors to bring additional and varying skills and experiences onto the GGA board with the aim of meeting the future challenges of an expanded organisation.

The second change is to remove the regional committees from the GGA constitution to allow for a new and contemporary national group that represents the broad cross-section of Australian agriculture to be formed and better address the needs of the GGA group of companies now and into the future.

These changes are vital to ensure that GGA maintains its relevance to Australian agriculture going forward, and I encourage all GGA members to vote and support these changes.

In addition to voting by proxy, GGA members also have the option of direct voting, by either attending the AGM in Albury, or voting by post, fax or online using the details provided in the AGM voting packs that members will have recently received.

John Eastburn

chairman

Grain Growers Association

Water units express emotion, not the amount

Do we talk about Fevola weighing 98 000 grams?

Is the Melbourne Cup run over 3.2 million millimetres? Are Commodores advertised as costing 3 600 000 cents and freeway speeds shown as 110 000 metres per hour?

Then why do city journos, National and Liberal Party hacks and often ill-informed malcontent letter-writers insist on referring to 75 Gl (gigalitres) of Goulburn Valley Sugarloaf Pipeline water (or less that one thousandth of Australia's average total annual freshwater extraction) as 75 000 000 000 litres or 75 billion litres?

Is it a form of technically-correct subliminal exaggeration, designed to exacerbate emotional controversy?

When irrigators and the water industry talk in bulk water measurement units, they talk of megalitres (1 Ml is one million litres or an Olympic swimming pool full) or gigalitres (1 Gl is 1000 Ml).

Citizens worried about reckless claims that John Brumby is stealing farmers' Murray-Darling Basin water to garner city votes, should be aware that the 75 Gl pipeline water equates to about three per cent of average annual basin infusion of Snowy Scheme water, from east and south of the divide, and that Brumby could easily have bought 75 Gl of irrigation water for less that $200 million, instead of generously arranging $900 million towards a desperately-needed water-saving upgrade of our seriouslydebilitated northern irrigation network.

John Gray

Toolamba