SYDNEY - For the sixth straight year Australia's farmers are waiting in drought-parched lands for enough rain to allow them to begin planting. Nobody knows if it is climate change or bad luck, but it just does not rain when needed in Australia's grain belt anymore.

"It's been like this since 2002. We don't get the autumn rain breaks," wheat grower John Ridley said from his farm at West Wyalong, 350 kilometres (218 miles) west of Sydney in the heart of Australia's eastern wheat belt. Australia's planting season traditionally begins in the third week of April, and ideally farmers need rain well before.

This year Australia's worst drought in 100 years began to break in February and early March with good rain. Then the rain stopped, leaving farmers with another long, dry wait. "They're hoping it's going to be a big crop," Ridley said. "In a drought situation they'll go wall-to-wall wheat to try and create an income," he said.

Australia's wheat growers normally produce the second-biggest annual exports in the world, worth around A$4 billion (US$3 billion), and sell most of their harvest to the monopoly exporter AWB Ltd., the former Australian Wheat Board.

Uncertainties are worse than ever this year as farmers wait for a government decision on who will be exporting Australia's crop after the explosive scandal of AWB providing Saddam Hussein's Iraq with kickbacks to secure sales.

Prime Minister John Howard said on Thursday the government reached a "tentative view" on the wheat monopoly in a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, but would not say what the view was. "We need to have someone out there doing the advance marketing, taking the currency and other futures protection that needs to be done," rural-based Trade Minister Warren Truss told reporters before going into a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

Most farmers are passionate about keeping the single desk, believing the AWB is able to get the best prices, but rain is a higher priority still. "If they get rain they'll plant every available acre....and worry about how they market it later," said Andrew Walker, a broker at Fox Commodities.

Ron Storey, a leading industry analyst at Australian Crop Forecasters said: "Absolutely the major decision will be whether it rains, not whose going to be marketing it". Australian Crop Forecasters is predicting a record wheat crop of 26-27 million tonnes for 2007-08 crop year, up from less than 10 million tonnes in 2006. The government's Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics is forecasting 24.98 million.

But Australia has had highly variable crop performances this decade as the country's drought emerges, wanes, re-appears and eases again, with the wheat crop bouncing between its lowest levels in three decades to record highs. In 2005 farmers had to wait until June before good rain fell, soaking some parts of eastern Australia for the first time in over four years. With just enough time to get a crop into the ground, farmers danced in the rain when it finally fell.

Australia went on to produce its second-biggest wheat crop ever in 2005-06, of 25.1 million tonnes. This nudged the record of 26.1 million tonnes in 2003/04, which followed a drought-decimated crop of 10.1 million tonnes the year before. Farmers hope that 2007 will produce another bounce-back for wheat, and that exports will be through a single desk. But first it has to rain.

(By Michael Byrnes, Planet Ark, 13/04/2007)