Australians should pray for rain, because if substantial rainfall does not come in the next month the Government will ban irrigation in the country’s agricultural heartland so that there is enough to drink, the Prime Minister said today.

John Howard’s warning heralded a dramatic increase in food prices and the prospect that tens of thousands of farmers could see their crops fail.

Amid the worst drought in the nation’s history, Mr Howard said an expert panel had advised the Government that it had no choice but to turn off the water irrigation systems in the vast Murray-Darling basin in eastern Australia, an area about four times the size of the United Kingdom.

Its 55,000 farmers supply virtually all of Australia’s stone and citrus fruits, vegetables, cotton and rice. It is also the location of many of the nation’s vineyards.

It is expected that food costs in Australia will begin to rise immediately, and there were predictions that scores of farmers would be forced off their land.

Mr Howard said that only the unlikely event of huge rains within the next six weeks would replenish the depleted Murray-Darling river system, Australia’s largest inland water source.

The five years of drought have already devastated many small towns as farm incomes have shrunk but Mr Howard said the experts’ report made clear the situation was now “unprecedentedly dangerous”. If water supplies were not shut off to farmers, he said, it would be impossible to guarantee that people in inland towns and cities would have enough water to drink or wash.

The Prime Minister said: “These are just stark facts. I am not gilding the lily. I wish I had another story. I would like to be talking optimistically about the drought, rather than relaying this kind of story.”

Agronomists warned Australians to expect food price increases as a result of the Prime Minister’s announcement and said that they may come immediately.

“If it continues like this we will see food becoming increasingly scarce and it will be reflected in the price of it,” said Joylon Burnett, head of the Irrigation Association of Australia.

“Annual crops, they just simply won’t be planted if the water is not there,” he said.

Ben Fargher, head of the National Farmers Federation, said the situation was even more critical for supplies of fruit. Once trees died, it took four or five years for replanted trees to produce fruit. This would seriously affect supplies across Australia of stone fruits, grapes, avocado and almonds, he said.

Winemakers predicted that the 2008 vintage would be crippled because of the water supply crisis. It would be worse than the current 2007 vintage, which suffered a 40-per cent drop in the amount of wine grapes picked and crushed.

Joy Sutton, who farms with her husband on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, said that they would have to abandon their stone fruit trees, and that many farmers would have to leave their land to survive. She said that in southwestern New South Wales many communities had already become ghost towns because of the drought.

“The rural population will probably halve in ten years,” she said.

The past 12 months have been the driest in 115 years of record-keeping for flows into the inland river system. Denying farmers irrigated water supplies is an unprecedented step.

The five years of drought have already led to severe water usage restrictions in Brisbane and Melbourne, including a ban on washing cars, extremely limited watering of gardens and an expectation that people will take four-minute showers. Thieves regularly steal water from swimming pools and other storage areas using road tankers, and old towns flooded decades ago for dam systems have re-emerged as water storage levels slump.

The drought has led to progress in at least two old murder cases because discarded murder weapons have been discovered as lakes dry up.

Mr Howard, who has long refused to link the Australian drought with global climate change, has not changed his position. He said the drought was “a national challenge to be dealt with at a national level”.

But Julia Gillard, the deputy leader of the Australian Labour Party, said that unless Australia began to deal with its contribution to global climate change, future drought and water supply crisis would worsen. A Labour Government would sign the Kyoto protocol on climate change. The Howard Government has refused.

Mr Howard is trying to get the Australian states to agree to a $10 billion national water plan to make supplies more secure.

But today his appeal went higher: “We must all hope and pray there is rain,” he said.

Forecasters say there is about a 50-per cent chance of significant rain before June.

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