Agmates

NSW - Peak Hill Wheat Grower (Location) and Chairman of the Wheat Growers Action Group (WAG) Peter Cannon writes:

Federal Minister for Agriculture Tony Burke (pictured) today declared that he is more than comfortable with the delivery of the marketing of Australia’s wheat crop to multi-nationals and regional monopolies.

I and members of Wheat Growers’ Action Group met with Mr Burke for 45 minutes yesterday in Canberra and were aghast as he lectured us on the benefits of the Rudd Government’s system.

As a result of that meeting and the second reading of the Bill in Parliament yesterday we are demanding the federal government compensate wheat growers for loss of income and transfer of risk if its Wheat Export Marketing legislation is passed by parliament.

The legislation which was introduced to parliament last Thursday threatens the livelihood of thousands of growers and rural communities and removes the only advantage that Australian farmers have over heavily subsidized international competitors.

The legislation will abolish the National Pool, which has been an effective and orderly marketing system for the past 60 years. It also meant farmers were guaranteed a buyer of their wheat which will no longer be the case under the government’s changes.

The new laws favour big business and multi-nationals by granting them licences to export Australian wheat. Growers are worried the export companies will drive down prices as they compete to secure overseas markets.

There’s also grave concerns about regional monopolies controlling the movement of wheat, and bulk handling companies restricting grower access to up-country storage and port facilities.

There’s a likelihood that the bulk handlers may not apply for export permits but will accumulate wheat and act as a front for the multi-nationals. This will allow a situation where the mega-traders will avoid scrutiny by taking control of the wheat as it leaves the port.

Photo: Grain Silos and Loading Terminal at Port Lincoln South Australia:

The American multi-national, Cargill, would under Rudd’s system, through its link with the cash-strapped Graincorp, control the crop from paddock to customer. The champagne corks will be popping in Cargill’s head office.

The federal government has been hypocritical in its response the USA last week passing its Farm Bill to continue to pay $US307 billion in subsidies to its farm sector, which is in direct conflict to the objectives in the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations.

Mr Burke has said the Rudd Government worked hard to seek a level playing field for Australian producers, yet it is moving to punish growers for the perceived misdemeanours in Iraq of the Australian Wheat Board (AWB).

We ask, how this level playing field work with the proposed new wheat export marketing legislation ending the only advantage Australian wheat growers have had over subsidized growers in other countries - that is our single desk marketing system that has served Australia for well over 60 years?

The Trade Minister, Simon Crean, (pictured) has expressed his dismay at the increase in farm support in the US Farm Bill. How does he think the Australian wheat growers feel at our own government proposing to remove our only step on to this “level playing field,” and thus adding further to the delight of the US wheat growers!

The Federal Labor Government will need to provide an industry adjustment package in excess of $10 billion to allow growers any chance to operate and remain viable under the new legislation.

To add to the insult, growers are likely to be hit with a levy to pay for the $4 million dollars the government has pledged for the annual budget of Wheat Exports Australia - the industry’s new regulator.

There will also be a tax-payer funded education scheme to teach growers how to market their grain under the changes. It’s more unnecessary waste of tax-payer funds when there’s already a proven marketing system in place, a system that more than 80 per cent of growers want to remain.

WAG members (logo pictured) are deeply worried the new wheat export bill has the potential to send growers broke and family farms will disappear along with those communities that rely on them.

So too does the Country Women’s Association (CWA), which at its recent annual conference called on the federal government to retain the present wheat marketing system for the 2008/09 cropping season. They also called for growers to be surveyed on whether they want the current system retained, just as Kevin Rudd had always demanded of John Howard.

The WA Farmers Federation and the Wheat Growers Association (a national body) has also confirmed its support for WGAG.

We are calling on Minister Burke to withdraw the bill immediately and allow the current national pool system to remain in place for the 08/09 harvest, to avoid a debacle which will see the collapse of the Australian grains industry.

Growers will take direct action to ensure that their message gets across if this Government insists on pushing the Bill through and there is no doubt that it will suffer acute embarrassment as it attempts to justify this sell out of Australian interests.

WGAG has launched a petition opposing the Wheat Export Marketing Legislation - go to our website: www.concernedwheatgrowers.com

We are urging wheat growers to get involved. To find out what you can do to help please contact me Peter Cannon on mobile 0428 697 634 or my phone fax is 02 6869 7634.

________________________________________________________________

Agmates Says:

Rudd has Conned Us.

Kevin Rudd promised Australian wheat farmers that if Labor came to power and growers wanted the Single Desk, Labor would retain it.

It now appears Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was prepared to promise farmers anything without any intention of fulfilling those commitments just to get elected. All of those in Rural and regional Australia who voted Labor for the first time have been conned.

See evidence of Kevin Rudd’s Broken Promises in the links below. Click on them to read.

Kevin Rudd then Opposition Leader Letter to NSW Wheat Grower Darryl Kitto

Senator Ron Boswell - Rudd Letter reveals support for Single Desk

Tony Windsor Ind Fed MP - Rudd assured me Single Desk would be Retained

Senator Ron Boswell

“Kevin 07 curried favour with growers by telling them their single desk would stay.

Kevin 08 gets rid of the single desk. How can anybody respect anything he says?”

.

Nationals & Liberals Split Over Wheat Marketing
________________________________________
Have your Say!

NSW Cattle producer “Straight Talking” John Carter writes: (Opinion)

Australia’s new Trade Minister, Simon Crean (pictured), is coasting along on the back of the same idiotic advisor’s that have taken Australia to the second highest debtor nation in the OECD during a mineral boom.

His disappointment at the new US Farm Bill continuing to subsidize grain farmers is akin to a child bemoaning the setting of the sun. “Please Mummy, stop it going away”. They have repeated the disappointment press release for over 30 years! These people need a heavy dose of reality salts.

Chinese, European and US Governments have known for years that food supply is as important as defense.

Australia’s fat cat bureaucrats, NFF (National farmers Federation) officials on their career paths and Business class travel around the world and empty minded ministers in First Class don’t want to understand this very basic concept.

Amongst public figures only the late Bob Santamaria and Independent Federal MP Bob Katter (pictured) have been able to see and say . Bob, apart from his deep reading and use of the Parliamentary Research Library lives in the far north of Australia and is closer to the real world.

Insular Canberra doesn’t understand that when you are in a hole and want to get out of it the first thing to do is to stop digging. They neither understand holes or digging. They just keep travelling and polluting the atmosphere with their free trade passports. Why?-

“Put your money on self interest, you always know that it is trying”.

We are disappearing under a mountain of debt. We have the second highest interest rates in the OECD- and rising because we have to service the huge debt and, unlike the USA, we don’t have the power to claim that ours is the world currency and print it with no backing. Our high interest rates mean speculation in “carry trades” as money men borrow at 0.5% in Japan and lend at 7-8% in Australia. Madness.

We now import all sorts of food from subsidized Communist China. We have destroyed our manufacturing industry and are destroying our pork, orange, milk and sugar industries. The policy is the antithesis of Pliny’s AD 69 call to Rome ” We must, whatever happens, safeguard the family farm”.

When I went to Paris in 1983 on my Churchill Fellowship tour and met with OECD officials they told me that they had dismissed Australian negotiators as fools as they protested at subsidies.

But what about our beef access to the world? With the world’s only mandatory RFID NLIS we can’t get another kilo into Europe. We haven’t filled the US quota for 5 years and are unlikely to ever fill it again as drought and alternative land use lower our herd.

As we near parity with the US dollar expect to see US Choice grade beef begin to appear in our top restaurants. “They can’t do that, they have no NLIS and they have BSE” we will cry -That mightn’t work-. South Korea is BSE free and the US are forcing their beef in there even without a free trade agreement finalized.

But what about our mineral exports to China? No Free Trade agreement there or with Russia where some of our beef is now going. “Our minerals will save us”. Look at South Africa but worse-look at Nauru.

Nauru was one of the wealthiest countries on earth as its phosphate royalties flooded in, there was no push for alternate industry or self sufficiency, the phosphate ran out and it is now a basket case economy. If we don’t change course it is also Australia’s future.

Globalisation has seen the people of 47 of 50 African countries and much of South and Central America go backwards under free trade and US multi national company thuggery.

That is why desperate people sank the Seattle negotiations with mass protests. That is why the US multinational dominated WTO now meet in isolated centres like Doha.

Oodnadatta should apply for the post Doha meeting with a well organized farmer/manufacturer repeat of the Battle of Little Big Horn to follow. The Custardisation of the Free Trade Custers would make the world in general and Australia in particular, a far better place.

__________________________________________________________________

Have Your say! To join John is an online discussion of the issues he has raised, just leave a comment.

Agmates Editor Steve Truman writes:

The Australian Federal government will come under enormous pressure from the beef & lamb industry’s to negotiate a free trade agreements (FTA) with South Korea & China. FTA’s are urgently needed to match a proposed USA FTA with South Korea & a recently signed New Zealand - China FTA.

Federal Agriculture Minister Tony Burke (pictured left) is to be congratulated on his proactive visit to Asia and particularly South Korea earlier this month.

However developments in the last week will mean he has a lot of work to do to save Australian beef producers from a potentially disastrous beef trade distortion if the US- South Korea FTA goes ahead.

The USA and South Korea have reached an agreement to lift restrictions US beef imports. If the proposed US-Korean Free Trade Agreement goes ahead Australian Beef exports to our 3rd largest customer will be virtually wiped out unless Australia is able to enter into its own FTA with South Korea.

Australia last year exported more than $800 million worth of beef to South Korea.

US and Australian beef exports to South Korea currently attract a 40 per cent import tariff. Under the US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that will fall to zero for USA producers within 15 years. This puts Australian Beef exports at an insurmountable disadvantage.

David Inall, (pictured left) Executive Director of the Cattle Council of Australia said

“The main threat posed by the ban’s lifting was that a US-South Korea free trade deal could now become law - which meant dramatic tariff cuts for US beef.”

“It really only serves to reinforce the need for Australia to go down the path of a free trade agreement with Korea,” Mr Inall said.

“It’s imperative that Australia strikes a deal with parity of access otherwise we will be placed at a clear disadvantage.”

————————————————————–

Same deal with Our Friends Across “The Ditch”

A newly signed free trade agreement (FTA) between China and New Zealand will have the same impact on Australian lamb exporters.

China currently imposes tariffs of up to 23 per cent on lamb from Australia and New Zealand, but the latter’s tariffs will fall to zero by 2016 as a result of the new FTA, signed in the week ending 11 April 2008.

Chris Groves, the president of the Sheepmeat Council of Australia, said that with China now the third largest market for Australian lamb, it was important that Australia moved quickly to sign its own FTA with China.

Tony Burke needs to get cracking on moving the Rudd government negotiating a FTA deals with South Korea and China. Negotiating FTA’s are notoriously long and slow processes. The three Key government ministers who will move this along are Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Trade Minister Simon Crean and Agriculture Minister Tony Burke.

—————————————————————

Update No1 - 23rd April @ 1.05pm

Australia currently accounts for some 95% of the South Korean beef market, this is up from 45% prior to the South Korean ban on US meat in 2003 in the wake of the BSE find in the US. This unchallenged asses to the South Korean & Japanese market has been the key driver behind a resurgence in the Australian beef industry since 2003.

—————————————————————

Update No2 - 23rd April @6.46pm

South Korea Braces For a Dip in Beef prices.

South Korean cattle producers aren’t very happy either. Ahead of the re-entry of U.S. beef into its market, South Korea expects a significant decline in its beef prices.

The Korea Rural Economic Institute (KREI), a state-run agricultural think tank, projects cattle prices to plummet by nearly 14 percent compared with 2007 prices. If U.S. beef imports total 240,000 metric tons, a 20 percent increase over last year, the price of premium beef could fall by as much as 5.7 percent.

If there is a 30 percent increase in beef imports, local beef prices will drop 8.3 percent to 10.4 percent, while beef prices would fall by 11.4 percent to 14.2 percent if 280,000 tons of foreign beef are imported.

—————————————————————

Have Your Say!

Leave your reply below or click on the Blue words Comments and the reply box will appear.

News South Wales Cattle Producer John Carter writes;

“This is the second in the series of articles written after my return from the USA where I attended and was a key note speaker at R-CALF USA’s 3 day annual conference held in Omaha Nebraska. I participated and spoke as a representative of the Australian Beef Association (ABA).”

Free Trade Agreements benefit “Billionaire Thugs” and not ordinary citizens.

Conference Key Note Speaker, Lorri Wallach , Director of the 200,000 strong Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch gave Free Trade the most energetic and fact based demolition that I have ever heard.

Her description of the brainpower of those who negotiated the recent Free Trade Agreements is unprintable.

However to summarize Ms Wallach and her organization believe “the US/Australian Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is of no benefit to the ordinary people, but is of huge benefit to multi national chemical companies and other billionaire thugs.”

Ms Wallach contends that the World Trade Authority (WTO) is undemocratic and operates in secrecy, that it is controlled by big business interests who exploit cheap labor abroad and that it has begun to encroach on the rights of countries to protect their environment and restrict imports of unsafe foods and hazardous materials.

However it was the Leadership Townhall meeting following my effort that really impressed me. Sponsored by R-CALF and the Coalition for a Prosperous America, some 300 men and women sat around dinner in the ballroom of the hotel.

An old, dignified Nebraskan Senator spoke of America being brought to its knees and the need for a rebirth. We then listened to seven brilliant speakers address answers to correcting what they believe is the impending US Depression .

Leaders in manufacturing, the trade unions (Union Boss Richard Trumka addressing the conference in the photo below) and farming attacked the de-regulation and free trade policies of the past 20 years.

A man from Paul Revere’s 1801 Revere Copper Products, explained how China was putting them out of business.They could manufacture a Revere silver plated bowl for $20 but China could do it for $14.28, not because of cheaper labor but because of their currency.

Colorado apple farmers are being put out of business by China for the same reason. Free trade just doesn’t work with different currency regimes.

The Union official spoke brilliantly on jobs being lost , health care becoming unaffordable. This was an inspiring coalition.

It was a privilege to be part of a general panel for questions. It was a privilege to be a part of this most inspiring gathering. Photo of me (seated centre) with Judith McGeary of the Farm & ranch Freedom Alliance and R-CALF CEO Bill Bullard answer questions from those at the conference on the Animal ID and Trade Panels.

I wished that anyone with influence in Australia was listening. Here is the policy platform for a new Australian party to take.

This was the heart of America rising against Globalization greed and distortion.

Belatedly Americans are realising that China has outsmarted them. One speaker said “We put the small crooks in yellow suits and send them to gaol and the big ones in pin stripe suits and send them to Washington”.

They see both major parties as multinational stooges. There is a grass-roots mood for change in the USA and these people are serious about getting the de-regulation and Free Trade policy’s of the last 20 years reversed.