Floods, heavy rain put squeeze on mango, sugarcane crops

Rainfall was decreasing, the Bureau of Meteorology said, leading to less flooding in the tropical north coast. But storms would remain and could lead to localised flash flooding, the bureau’s senior meteorologist Laura Boekel said.

The rain fell over a wide area, hitting sugarcane regions as far south as Tully, 140 kilometres south of Cairns, and other farming areas growing bananas, mangoes, papaya and lychees.

Queensland Fruit and Vegetable Growers chairman Joe Moro, a mango farmer in Mareeba, west of Cairns, said the damage to crops would be a mix of heavy marking or blemishes on fruit and some losses of produce.

“It’s a combination of flooding and high torrential rain,” he told The Australian Financial Review over a patchy phone line. “I’m in the middle of it.”

Even a nearby turf farm had been affected, he said. Mr Moro, who has been farming for almost four decades, said it was too early to calculate any losses but among factors would be the loss of any plants, how long water remained over land and any erosion.

Dan Galligan, chief executive of sugar farming body Canegrowers, said the region hit by flooding accounted for about 20 per cent of the industry’s production.

The level of damage was unclear, as harvesting recently finished. Canegrowers was evaluating potential scenarios, with one concern for newly planted sugarcane (other parts of fields are in fallow or use regrowth of existing cane). The newly planted cane could account for about 20 per cent of cropland and the concern rested on whether it could be lost.

“That’s the most vulnerable,” Mr Galligan told the Financial Review.

He said other existing cane, more rooted in the ground, could be lost if underwater for more than 72 hours, but floodwaters seemed to be draining quickly. The next issue for farmers would be cleaning up the silt and mulch dumped on cropland, plus repairing any damage to infrastructure such as rail lines used for transporting cane.

BOM criticism

Mr Galligan said pricing was currently high worldwide and largely determined by overseas markets such as India. That meant any losses from Cyclone Jasper would mean some farmers would not be able to sell as much sugar as planned into the higher prices. He added flood insurance for crops was too expensive for many farmers.

Amid criticism about timing of flood warnings, with some residents reporting they only received alerts after being inundated, BOM’s Ms Boekel told a press conference that rain rates had “evolved very quickly” on the weekend, affecting predictions.

The bureau on Saturday afternoon had started calling and briefing emergency services and councils, and then started issuing first warnings by around 9pm, Ms Boekel said, acknowledging there “wasn’t a lot of lead time”.

“And we started seeing those rainfall rates really change in the early hours of Sunday morning,” she said.

Federal Agriculture Minister Murray Watt said the government had “full confidence” in BOM and the “reality is that we were dealing with a highly unpredictable weather system” with water moving so fast that “it simply wasn’t possible to update everyone with information as quickly as things were moving”.

Forecasting and emergency warning has been criticised in other floods and Mr Watt said that after every major event, “we always refine the systems that we have in place”.