Our current Australian anti-farmer policies coupled with a population that grows by 1 person net each 1.3 seconds will lead us to a point within 40 years where we will be a net importer of food. As the world population grows by another 2.3 billion people, food in Australia will indeed become a scarce resource.
During the past 8 years just on 11,000 Australian farmers have left the land. Today just 130,000 farmers or 0.6% of the population not only feed 21.5 million Australians but export enough food to feed double that number.
Australia is one of the world’s major agriculture exporters not because we are a major producer on a world scale, but because we have a small population. Our population is exploding whilst each day our policy makers work hard at reducing the number of farmers and their capacity to produce, in the name of ‘free trade’ and the environment.
As the Australian anti-farmer Federal and State Labour governments continue with policies that shrink our farming sector, world experts are urging them to pour money into ag & water research to avoid world wide food shortages and civil unrest.
THE director-general of the International Water Management Institute, Colin Chartres, has warned that Australia, along with the other developed nations, needs to invest more in research into agriculture and water management and in international aid.
The Rudd government is doing the exact opposite with huge cuts to CSIRO ag research funding including the closing of a number of world renown research facilities.
One of the first things the new Ag Minister Tony Burke did in coming to power 12 months ago was to scrap the very successful Farmbiz program which subsidized training and ongoing resource management education for farmers.
The QLD Labor government has followed up with an announcement it will close more Department of Primary Industry research facilities in that state.
Chartres says the food crisis of the past year was an important warning sign. “We have to heed the warning. Otherwise the ultimate outcome is, if we have millions of people starving in the developing world, much more social unrest, much more fertile ground for terrorists and extremists and the whole world becomes a lot less safe.
There is whole lot standing on it in terms of social security, as well as food security.”
Australia leads the world in Agriculture free trade, to the detriment of our own nation’s food security. Still the federal and state government’s attacks on our farming sector are unrelenting.
Exceptional circumstances drought relief is the only assistance the government offers our farmers and they are considering scrapping that. Our drought ravaged farmers received approx $1 billion dollars through this assistance over the past 8 years. Compare that to the great ‘free marketers’ of the world, the USA who have paid grain subsidies (not drought assistance, just a subsidy) to their farmers totalling $128 billion for the same period.
There is no doubt that if the government scraps drought assistance we will lose more farmers.
Whilst News Corp boss Rupert Murdock applauds Australia’s Agriculture Free Trade policies, the reality is that ‘free trade’ has been disastrous for our farmers.
A combination of cheap imported pork and sky high grain prices has seen 40% of pig farmers leave the industry in just the last 12 months. In a good indication of what is to come, there will be shortages of hams in shops this Christmas. Actually when you can’t buy a ham this Christmas you can thank the ‘free trade’ coalition party polices for this one.
THAT most succulent of yuletide traditions, a perfectly smoked and glazed Christmas ham, is at risk of becoming a delicacy only for the rich as the chronic shortage of Australian farmed pigs inflates the price of pork.
It is estimated 40 per cent of pig farmers have left the industry in the past year, squeezed off the land by prohibitive grain costs and record volumes of subsidised pigmeat flooding in from Denmark, the US and Canada.
The Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme is the greatest threat we now face to our food security.
It is estimated that under the scheme approx 10% of our productive farm land will be turned over to growing trees over the next decade. Not to mention that by 2015 when Agriculture is scheduled to become a covered industry that Australia’s leading economist Brian Fisher has projected that Australian livestock producers will be completely lost as an industry.
Let’s not forget that the nations food bowl, the Murray Darling Basin is also under extreme pressure from past and present State government over allocation of water to irrigators and now the drought. The federal government is buying back water allocation and turning it into environmental flows. As this plays out over the next 10 years we will see even less food produced.
One of the most critical factors is water. “Water is getting extremely scarce because of demand in many countries.” He says there are problems with lack of water in Africa, and declining groundwater in India and Pakistan.
Chartres says with water becoming scarcer, there is no simple answer.
“We can’t make inputs cheaper, so food will probably be more expensive. But the critical thing is we have to grow a lot more to feed the extra 2.3 billion mouths that are expected by 2050.”
The State Labour Governments of QLD and NSW are major contributors to our dwindling farming sector. It was they after all that legislated the Draconian Native Vegetation Legislation laws that has locked up millions of hectares of productive farm land for eternity.
That legislation treats any farmer who dares to cut down a tree to grow more food as a criminal. The legislation was designed to do two things, win green votes for inept state labor governments and secondly to secure funding from a federal coalition government that used the carbon credits as a Kyoto ‘free kick’.
This was done regardless of the fact that it stripped the property rights of 1,000’s of private individuals and permanently capped the amount of arable land available for food production.
All the while the inept State Labor governments of NSW and QLD continue to allow prime farming land within a few hundred kilometres of major populations to be destroyed by coal mining companies. All in the name of coal mining royalties for cash strapped state labor governments. Examples of this are the the 32,000 acres of prime farming land at Haystack on the Darling Downs, land at Felton and Kingaroy in Queensland and on the Liverpool plain in NSW.
Lastly lets not forget the deregulation of our export wheat marketing. For the first time in a number of years Australian wheat farmers are harvesting a good crop that is supposed to pull them back from the brink of financial ruin after years of failed crops due to drought. However, now thanks to the Rudd governments deregulation they are being offered cash prices by ‘free market traders’ that are way under the cost of production. This will force 1,000’s of wheat growers off the land in the next 12 months.
We will see a day in Australia when we will have food shortages. We won’t be able to import it all as most countries already consume everything they produce.
The day that reality hits home as we are starting to glimpse with this years Christmas hams, the Australian public can look back and curse the names of those short sighted Politicians that lead Australia into the food shortage abyss we are surely headed into – Paul Keating, John Howard, John Anderson, Mark Vale, Warren Truss, Kevin Rudd, Tony Burke, Peter Costello, Peter Beattie, Anna Bligh, Bob Carr – the list of culprits goes on and on.
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