Dealing with salinity in Wheatbelt Valleys - Department of Water

Social issues
There are at least four distinct sets of social issues
related to salinity.
1. Community input to planning and decisionmaking
is needed.
2. There are social impacts of salinity and its
management.
3. Social issues affect the uptake of new
management practices.
4. The community needs support from
government to manage and protect assets at
risk.
There are economic dimensions to each of these
social issues.
1. Community input to planning and decisionmaking:
The community should play a strong role in setting
the objectives of salinity policy and salinity
management. The economic dimension here is
that the appropriate balance between economic,
environmental and specific social objectives should
strongly reflect current attitudes and values of the
people with an interest. Members of the farming
community, in particular, also provide important
site-specific and community-specific information
(including economic information) about the salinity
problem and its management in different
situations.
2. Social impacts of salinity and its management:
Among the various impacts of salinity, social
impacts are a prominent category. In addition,
there are social impacts of salinity treatments.
Losses of productive land to salinity will contribute
to declines in farm numbers and farm incomes,
with flow-on social effects on rural towns and the
provision of services. Overall, salinity is just one of
a number of factors contributing to economic
pressures on farmers. For most farmers, salinity is
far from being the most important of these factors.
The rate of adjustment of some farmers out of
agriculture is not likely to be greatly influenced by
land salinisation, although it will no doubt be the
decisive factor for some individuals. Other
economic pressures will continue to be the main
influence on farm numbers and farm incomes.
– 9 –
Pannell
In regions where salinity treatments (particularly
woody perennials) are adopted at very high levels,
their social impacts are likely to be even greater
than those of salinity per se. To be adopted at
such levels, woody perennials will need to be
highly attractive in economic terms. In such cases,
they will have positive social impacts (e.g. local
employment), particularly where processing and
value adding of harvested product occurs within
rural areas. A good example is the integrated
processing plants which have been proposed for
oil mallees, to provide oil, energy and activated
carbon. Negative social impacts have been
strongly identified by some communities in highrainfall
regions where blue gums have been
established over large areas. There are reasons to
hope that such negative impacts will not occur in
the Wheatbelt (Olsen 2001), but it may be a risk in
some situations.
3. Social influences on the uptake of new
management practices:
Government policies for salinity rely very much on
farmers to voluntarily adopt new farming practices
to manage salinity. The speed and level of
adoption of new farm management practices
depends on many factors. The economic
profitability of the practices is probably the most
decisive influence, but economics interacts with
social factors in this realm as well.
The strength of Landcare groups and catchment
groups in Western Australia has been high in the
past, but farmer dissatisfaction with the Landcare
approach has increased in recent years. In part
this reflects the new level of understanding in the
farming community about the scale of response
needed on farms in order to successfully prevent
salinity, and a recognition that voluntary adoption
of non-commercial treatments will not be viable at
that scale. As a result, the importance of
economic drivers for adoption of new practices
has been re-emphasised.
Even where commercially viable treatments are
available, social factors will play a role in their
speed of uptake. Group cohesiveness, strength of
information channels, credibility of information
sources, and demographic trends all play roles. As
an example of demographic influences, Barr et al.
(2000) has identified that many farmers in parts of
the Murray-Darling Basin have other sources of
income and may view agriculture as a secondary
occupation. A proportion are “on a trajectory out
of agriculture”. We cannot expect major