“From Little Acorns Mighty Oak
Trees Grow”
Walking
the Talk
And
The
Coalition Government’s White Paper on Agricultural Competitiveness
Congratulations to Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce and the National
Party for continuing to walk the talk on rural industry issues.
The new government is only into its third month in office and already
the National and Liberal Coalition Government has acted in the national interest
and blocked the proposed takeover of the agriculture infrastructure company
GrainCorp which is so vital to the economic interests of Australia’s grain
growers and called for the overdue inquiry into the MLA levy structure.
Free trade negotiations with South Korea and China have also been given
priority by the new Coalition Government and the free trade agreement with
South Korea was signed four days ago.
Under the free trade deal with South Korea tariffs will be eliminated on
Australian agricultural exports, including beef, wheat, sugar, dairy, wine,
horticulture and seafood, as well as resources, energy and manufactured goods.
The Centre for International Economics modeling shows that the South
Korean free trade agreement will be worth more than 5 billion in extra income
to Australia in the 15 years between 2015 and 2030.
Warren Truss, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Infrastructure and
Regional Development made a deliberate choice after the last election to retain
this portfolio which is so vital for the long-term interests of rural and regional
Australia.
A further demonstration of the
National Party and Coalition determination to bring about the necessary changes
for rural and regional Australia, if one
is needed, can be found in this weeks announcement by Agriculture Minister
Barnaby Joyce of the terms of reference for the Agricultural Competitiveness
White Paper announced by Prime Minister Tony Abbott prior to this year’s
election which sets out to put in place a strategy to double the Australian
agricultural production by 2050.
Barnaby Joyce has rightly recognised that farm gate profits must rise if
Australia is to take advantage of the growing Asian food markets.
As the Australian press have noted, the Agricultural Competitiveness White
Paper will put the supermarket duopoly payments to farmers under the microscope
and focus on the need to attract more domestic capital, as well as foreign
investment, into the agricultural sector.
Part of Barnaby’s strategy is for a review of the tax treatment of farm
investments to encourage Australian investment and super funds to commit
capital to the rural sector so that Australians can take advantage of the Asian
food bowl opportunities.
Barnaby also stated that the White Paper was about opening up new tracts
of land on multiple fronts suggesting that this might lead to shifts in crops
currently grown in existing agricultural areas to the new operations in the
North .
One example given by Barnaby Joyce in this regard was the possibility of
cotton production moving further north while citrus production might move south
suggesting that this would allow for less efficient trench irrigation to be
replaced with more efficient trickle irrigation which would boost overall productivity.
Barnaby noted that his home town of St George had been transformed
through irrigation from grazing to a cotton production centre employing about
6000 people over the last couple of decades.
Barnaby’s cotton production moving to the north vision fits perfectly
with the Flinders River/O’Connell Creek cropping proposal developed by the
Richmond Shire Council for the establishment of 190,000 mega litre irrigation
dam to be located on only allocated State land with a cropping area within 20
km of the Richmond Township .
Richmond Shire Council has identified a number of potential cropping
opportunities which have been successfully trialed in the area including
cotton, rice, chickpeas, mung beans, sorghum maize and a host of others and
note that the irrigation can be a mix of flood, centre pivots and trickle
irrigation systems.
Recent coalition government actions on foreign investments and
announcements on review of red meat industry organisational structures and Barnaby
Joyce’s Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper strategy sits comfortably with
the Strategic Plan for rural and regional development which arose out of the
Beef’s New Direction Forum held in Armidale in February 2010 and was launched
at the Rockhampton Beefs New Direction Forum held at Paradise Lagoons in August
2010.
The Paradise Lagoons 2010 Beefs New Direction Forum was addressed by the then Senator Barnaby
Joyce and Senator Bill Heffernan as well as Dr Julian Cribbs, the author of The Coming Famine book that predicts
that global demand for food will more
than double by 2050 due to population growth and improved diets in
industrialised Third World countries.
The Paradise Lagoons New Direction paper:
·
set out details of the decline in the number of
Australian farms and rural workforce in the previous 40 years
·
identified the
decline in cattle industry profitability over the last 40 years
·
identified the increasing level of government
influenced costs and charges paid by beef producers during the first decade of
this century
·
identified the accountability and efficiency flaws in
the red meat industry organisational structures that were put in place in the 1990’s, and
·
noted the need to reform those structures to make them
relevant to the collective needs of the industry in the 21st century
·
identified the problems facing Australia’s
agricultural sector as a consequence of the then current resources boom with
higher interest rates and a higher Australian dollar and uncompetitive
government influenced rural costs and charges compared to the subsidies and
financial support given to Australia’s foreign competitors by their governments
·
noted that unlike Australia’s Chinese and Brazilian
counterparts, Australian farmers no longer had access to long-term “patient”
development bank finance and,
·
noted that consequently Australian rural industries
could not access funding for expansion and innovation to take advantage of the
coming Asian food bowl boom whilst foreign state-owned and foreign companies
arrived to utilise cheap government subsidised interest loans to buy up
depressed Australian rural assets
·
concluded that the productivity of Australian
agriculture must be viewed not only as an economic imperative but as a matter
of national food security
The Paradise Lagoons Strategic Plan set out a strategy to:
1. increase profitability in
the cattle industry and rural Australia by
(a) increasing
domestic and export demand for better quality product and
(b)increasing domestic
competition by decreasing the power of the Australian supermarket duopoly, and
(c) reducing the burden of uncompetitive
government influenced costs and charges on the Australian red meat industry
2. implement industry
organisational restructure by streamlining and improving the efficiency of the
current industry organisations and
reducing unnecessary duplication of
services to improve beneficial outcomes for industry and reduce
unnecessary costs ,
3. introduce taxation reform
to encourage Australian capital investment into rural and regional Australia
4. establishing a development
bank along the lines of the previous Commonwealth Development Bank to provide
long term development finance for rural and regional Australian industry
5. provide the water, power
and communication infrastructure necessary to attract business and people to
regional Australia in order to put the people where they’re needed to produce
the necessary food to feed the world rather than on the coastal fringes where
75% of Australia’s population currently live.
One of the key objectives of the Paradise Lagoons Strategic Plan was to
form a coalition of producers, agricultural and mining industries, rural
businesses and Shire Councils to develop policy and influence government to
encourage infrastructure investment and reverse the population decline in rural
and regional Australia.
The following terms of reference
for the Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper released yesterday are four
square with the rural profitability issues and reform proposals set out in the
Paradise Lagoons Strategic Plan:
(a)
food security
for Australia and our overseas customers,
(b)
improved farm gate returns for Australian producers
(c)
drought
management ,
(d)
access to rural capital investment
(e)
farm debt levels and debt sustainability
(f)
supply chain competitiveness and its relationship to
food and fibre processing and fair returns to producers
(g)
critical rural and regional infrastructure investment
(h)
jobs growth
(i)
skills training and education and human capital
investment in the agriculture value chain
(j)
research and development
(k)
effectiveness
of regulations affecting the agriculture sector and the extent that those
regulations promote or retard competition, and
(l)
market access
The Richmond Shire Council Flinders River/O’Connell Creek cropping proposal also fits four square with the Paradise Lagoons Strategic Plan which proposed the bringing together of a coalition of regional interests, including Shire Councils, to halt the decline of Rural and Regional Australia and provide the population, workforce and infrastructure necessary for rural industries to produce food to support an increasing Australian and global population.
The 1200 participants at the February 2010 Forum in Armidale and the 500
cattle producers who attended the August 2010 Rockhampton Paradise Lagoons New
Directions Forum should take heart that their voices did not fall on deaf ears.
Clearly, Minister Barnaby Joyce and Senator Heffernan and through them
the National and Liberal Parties and Prime Minister Abbott, listened to the
voices of the grass roots producers and now to their great credit they have
moved to address the issues within the first three months of obtaining office.
As HuntBlog noted in its 20 September Newsletter -From Little Acorns Mighty Oak Trees Grow.
More pertinently, Australian rural producers now seem to have National
Party representatives in the mould of its Country Party origins and such
legendary Country Party figures as Black Jack McEwen, Doug Anthony, Ralph Hunt
and Peter Nixon who were prepared to stand up for rural Australia and walk the
talk and deliver outcomes rather than just mouthing platitudes to placate what Charles Massy identified in his book 'Breaking the Sheep's Back' as the unwashed peasantry and keep
them in their place.
A copy of the Terms of Reference of the Agricultural Competitiveness
White Paper can be viewed at http://agriculturalcompetitiveness.dpmc.gov.au/terms-of-reference
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