DARWIN – With Australia’s southern cotton regions plagued by drought, the industry has big plans for the country’s sparsely populated Northern Territory (NT) where crops are expected to cover more than 50,000 hectares of land within a few short years.
However, environmentalists and indigenous communities fear not enough is being done to protect the ecologically-important habitats being cleared to make way for cotton and are taking the NT government to the Supreme Court in a landmark challenge.