Liquid gold

Farmers are selling it and savvy investors are buying it, write Deborah Snow and Debra Jopson. Tomorrow, savvy Australian businessman Richard Lourey will climb aboard a plane bound for Hong Kong to sell our water to the world. Not water in bottles. Farm water. He wants to bag $100 million from overseas investors in Asia, Europe and North America to buy up permanent water rights along the Murray-Darling Basin, one of the longest river systems in the world. He plans to lease it back annually to those who want it - and can afford to pay.

Lourey is one of the new breed of global investors who see fresh water as business - big business.

Another is John Dickerson, a former CIA analyst in San Diego, who set up one of the first funds in the world dedicated to acquiring water rights.

Dickerson's Australian subsidiary Summit Water Holdings bought up $20 million worth of our permanent rural water rights two years ago and is on the lookout for more.

As Dickerson puts it: 'You might remember the old Will Rogers saying, 'You ought to buy land because they ain't making any more of it'. He could have said the same thing about water.'

Unnoticed by most of us living in the big cities, fresh water in this country has become liquid gold. For many farmers caught at the height of the drought over the past three years, with failed or unsown crops and little ability to fatten stock, selling water rights got them through.
Read article

I am stunned this is possible...

Irrigation farmers find buyers drying up
JEREMY MORTON and Ian Shippen are southern NSW irrigation farmers trying to use the water market to sell out and get off the drip.