Shock waves of a food crisis

Global Perspective

It’s a pivotal time for the parliament to be engaging with Australian food sector. As you know, as we speak, the world is teetering on yet another food crisis due in large part to the extensive drought and fires that have been ravaging the United States in recent times and we’ve seen their soy and corn crops all but fail. It has led to another round of financial speculation and people are expecting that the shock-waves are going to be as bad as they were in the food crisis in 2008.

We also have in Australia at the moment a visit from Sir John Beddington who is the United Kingdom chief scientist and he has been saying what the Greens have also been saying since 2009 following that food crisis the previous year that the world is now facing a series of simultaneous and interrelated crisis, and they are climate change, energy, water and food. And when you bring all those crises together on a finite planet with a global population going from 5 to 9 billion then you have got to a situation where business as usual just won’t cut it.

The 2008 food price shock actually caused a fundamental shift for many countries, particularly those reliant on importing food, because it was no longer was it a matter of trade for them; it became one of national security, to be dealt with outside of the normal global market practices.

It is in this context that Oxfam just released its latest report on global land grabbing, “Our Land, Our Lives”. During the 2008 crisis land deals tripled as both states and the private sector recognised that arable land and water are critical commodities – and in my view land and water, that is food, is going to replace oil in this century as they key commodity over which resource wars will be fought, as indeed they have been over oil last century.

Land grabbing by foreign investors, in particular foreign governments, has been concentrated in developing countries with severe and serious outcomes, in exacerbating localised hunger. More than 60 % of that investment is related to plans to export everything that has been grown and in many cases what is going to be grown are biofuel crops, and that land changing hands has been to date in some of the world’s poorest and hungriest countries and it’s going to affect more than a billion people. So it’s no wonder that Oxfam is drawing attention to that and calling on the World Bank to intervene and use its position as both an investor and advisor and to temporarily freeze its investments in agricultural land around the world. Such is the problem, such has been the change.

The shift from food as merely a global commodity to an issue of national security; and desirable capital asset is of course being spurred on by the known extent and severity of climate change. Even if we do manage to curb our emissions in the just 50 months or so that we have left, the scientists tell us that we have as a maximum to keep global warming to less than two degrees, what we’re going to see is that with a greater extent of extreme weather events we’re going to see global food supply become disrupted on a more regular basis. If we don’t manage to keep our emissions down to curb temperature rise to under two degrees, the situation will become even more dire. Land and water to grow food will become an even more critical part of our national security asset.

It couldn’t be a more pivotal time for Australia to be considering its position on food policy, both domestically and in terms of our global engagement. Next year Australia becomes a member of the G20 Troika, the three countries that set the agenda for the G20, in preparation for us taking the Chair of the G20 in 2014. We therefore have an unprecedented opportunity and responsibility over the next two years to influence global food policy, and it will be happening in the context of another global food price crisis. France, the current G20 Chair, has been calling for the creation of a global strategic food reserve to counter food price volatility in situations like the current one, where major crops fail.

What we haven’t heard from the government is how they intend to use the Chair of the G20 when it comes to engaging on food and agricultural policy around the world. And that’s all the more reason for us to be spending time looking at the Green Paper and the Food Plan. It also in my view is an opportunity for the Australian government in the G20 to look at two things in particular, and that is what mechanisms could you employ to stop the speculation in global food markets, particularly in times of stress, it’s one of the major drivers of inflation, and also how can we in Australia use our position in the G20 to influence the way aid budgets around the world are used to develop capacity in agriculture and agricultural production, and transport systems around the world.

We have an opportunity. I’m inviting you as key participants in this whole food system both here in Australia and many of you with multinational companies to recognise there is an opportunity to do something a bit visionary and a bit thoughtful, taking note of the trends.

National Perspective

I’m really disappointed I have to say with the Green Paper because it fails. It fails at every level to take account of the major trends globally that I referred to in terms of global crises. It’s actually a document for the best of times, it forecasts a boom in food exports for Australia, it says that there’s continuing domestic food security and largely technological solutions to critical challenges. Now that is a recipe for incremental change, not transformative policy. It suggests that there’s no serious engagement with the extent of the crises that are coming and therefore the opportunities that Australia might be able to take up.

But surely a government plan for something as fundamental as our food ought to be looking at realistic scenarios when it comes to climate change, when there’s a real danger for example that it will not only lead to loss of production in Australia, but real disruption elsewhere.

Therefore the first question for the food industry really has to be – is it in your interest to have a government only planning and directing our food systems policy based on very narrow and optimistic projections?
To answer that the assumptions in the National Food Plan’s Green Paper need to be examined, and I would argue that the Green Paper is built on a dangerous set of false assumptions. In fact the government should take note of the number of submissions that have come in, I’m really pleased that there’s been such a large amount of public engagement with the Green Paper, a consultative process, and look at it and go “wrong way: go back”. We need to think again.

The first thing you should ask of the Food Plan is what’s it for? What is this Food Plan supposed to be delivering for the country?

1. This is not a holistic plan, yet claims to be. Fundamentally misunderstands the food system.

The objectives of the National Food Plan green paper frame our national food system’s future in terms of competitiveness, productivity growth and access to markets.

This is not a holistic food plan for Australia. If it was, surely the number one over-riding objective of a National Food Plan should be to ensure the health and wellbeing of all Australians through securing their right to nutritious and adequate food; it should go to the wellbeing of our farmers and regional communities that provide our food; and the health of natural systems that underpin our food production.
They ought to be the objectives of a National Food Plan, and in the global context, what role Australia has in feeding the world, a world of an increasing population to 9 billion.

Without this focus, we will not have any of the outcomes that the government wants because if you want to have food, you have to have farmers on the land and you have to have land healthy enough to produce food in the first place.

2. There is a dangerous eliding of the ecological constraints and challenges facing Australia’s food system, including climate change.

In fact it’s hard to believe that the Green Paper has seriously consulted the Department of Climate Change, the CSIRO or other key organisations advising government on the challenges we face from climate change. As just one simple example, the paper proposes that Australia double its food exports by 2030, while barely acknowledging that some of the more kind predictions for Australia’s food production in the face of climate change is that we our agricultural productivity could be reduced by almost 20%. Little wonder that the WA Department of agriculture immediately declared such a goal unrealistic.

Similarly, the paper while noting to some degree the scale and threat posed by land degradation in Australia from acid (sodic) and saline soils and erosion does not acknowledge that like the rest of the world, Australia is losing top soil much faster than we can replenish it.

There is a misplaced confidence in our ability to simply innovate out of an overall situation of critical soil loss and declining soil health in many areas, not to mention the significant constraints on the quantity and quality of our water supplies.

We’re about to go with the Murray Darling plan, and this is meant to be a whole of government approach to food in this country, and if you’ve got a Murray Darling plan which is on track to come out recommending less water than the minimum amount of water that is necessary to maintain a healthy system, how can you suggest that you’re taking these challenges seriously. At the same time this massive expansion of coal seam gas which is undermining food production and jeopardising the health of aquifers into the future, plus we’ve got urban encroachment being allowed in many areas of productive agricultural land and that too is another threat to food production and the decision in Victoria to abandon some of the green corridors and go to urban encroachment, it takes away the capacity for urban communities to think about ways of having more localised food production on the outskirts of cities.

Obviously research and development, and the roll out of research and development, science and technology and deployment of that new science and technology and behavioural change in agricultural systems, transport systems, production systems and the rest are essential. That is where we have got to learn to do with what we’ve got, anticipate the trends, anticipate the constraints and putting money into R&D, science and technology and capacity building.

3. The Green Paper’s treats fundamental issues of nutrition and access to food as separate from the way in which we produce, process and distribute food.

You simply can’t do that. You can’t say we’re looking at a healthy population, we’re looking at a health system, a food system, and not linking up to it. It ignores existing vulnerabilities in Australia’s food security, particularly in relation to the domestic production of and access to fresh fruit and vegetables. This is the current situation, without any serious contemplation of possible climate change scenarios. For example only once does the Green Paper acknowledge that the price of fruit and vegetables is rising faster than unhealthy food, but it posits no real response to the situation.

Paper offers no effective response to Australia’s obesity crisis; in fact by promoting a business as usual approach of focussing on educating consumers and leaving industry to continue to self-regulate, it directly contradicts the government’s National Preventative Health Taskforce that called for urgent intervention to reshape Australia’s food supply, including regulatory measures.

The Paper doesn’t acknowledge that our social security payments are well known to be a major barrier to food security for our most vulnerable. And just yesterday, if you had a government that was serious about a healthy population you would not have a government and coalition backing a reduction in the single parent payment and the refusal to increase the Newstart allowance which has so many people living in poverty in Australia, and that is going to lead them to purchase food that is the cheapest that they can possibly get, regardless of its nutritional value and that in the long term adds a major burden to our health system.

4. Trade and export as a focus will do nothing to provide our farmers and food producers with long-term sustainability and prosperity; and misreads global food needs.

The paper fails to engage with the fact that farmers’ terms of trade have been steadily declining over the last 40 years and farmers have largely held on thanks to productivity gains that they’ve been able to achieve.
The latest figures out today show that our exports are 23.2 billion but we’re importing 26 billion.

There is no discussion on declining number of Australian farms (halved in last 40 years) and farmers (20% decline in number farmers since 1996). Without investing in our farmers, the paper looks increasingly like a strategy for cheap imports, with few exceptions. There is nothing in the Green Paper on keeping farmers on the land, producing food in the face of cheap imports.

We have again and again discussions about free trade is going to do it all, well free trade is not fair trade when it comes to our farmers. We have seen for years that Australian farmers can’t compete with the cheapest imports when there is no calculation of the cost of environmental compliance and/or labour standards, or both. We ought to be of course maintaining decent labour standards and decent environmental compliance but that has to be reflected in any trade because they’re not as they’re currently negotiated.

The other issue of course is biosecurity. We need to get to this conundrum where on the basis of being able to sell into markets on the basis of negligible risk we risk biosecurity. This is always a constant conundrum and we need to look at proper risk assessment processes.

Critics of the paper have pointed out that focussing on increasing our exports of grains, dairy, meat and sugar to the growing Asian middle classes is essentially a plan to export the Western diet and associated chronic diseases to our neighbours.

Nor does it do anything to alleviated global food insecurity. This is not export aimed at addressing the needs of the vulnerable in our region or anywhere else.

It puts all our eggs all in one basket too. Our producers have successfully targeted Asian markets, only now to find they are threatened by much cheaper, higher volume and only marginally lower quality competition from South American nations in particular. We will see this pattern repeated.

It also ignores the concerted efforts of our neighbours to reduce their reliance on us. China for example is importing dairy cows and building up its breeding lines and massively expanding production. Indonesia’s commitment to phase out its reliance on live export meat is another.

One of the major ways Australia can assist in food is in capacity building. We need to be thinking about not just selling a commodity into Asian markets but what they desperately need is ways to produce their food more sustainably and if they’re going to adopt changes, to make sure that the function of that is in health and well-being, not just exporting unhealthy Western diets into Asian countries because it’s going to be a recipe for us losing volume trade over time.

I think the issue of education and capacity building, using foreign aid to build capacity and build relationships is a key way for the food sector to engage.

5. Little engagement on implications for Australia’s food system in an energy-constrained world.

The Paper does acknowledge that the price of fertiliser and other key fossil-fuel derived inputs will rise for farmers it does not see this as a major constraint. But agriculture is already sensitive to oil price rises because of its reliance on it for mechanisation as well as inputs and transport.

Particularly concerning for the food industry, there is little discussion of the challenges facing transport through oil constraints, yet it is an essential component of Australia’s food system. How will we as a nation move food around the country, particularly when we have to date radically under-invested in freight rail systems, alternative fuel sources and other responses?

The Greens’ response

1. Rethink how we approach our food systems, placing the health and wellbeing of the people who produce it, who consumer it, and the environment that provides it at the heart of our policy objectives.

2. Significantly increase our investment in agricultural and food system research and development, focussed on delivering sustainability, resilience delivering long-term access to nutritional, healthy food. We don’t just need the R&D, we need the extension of it as well to directly assist producers, processors and communities. One of our biggest contributions to global food security should be sharing our agricultural expertise.

3. Rebuild our domestic food systems to create regional and local systems, ensure diversity and longevity based on healthy and prosperous rural and regional communities.

4. Level the playing field – reforming competition policy is critical such as reintroduction of anti-price discrimination and enforcing it. Australia is one of only 2 countries in the whole OECD that does not have anti-price discrimination measures.

5. Support consumers and producers in making informed choices. That means clear labelling for nutritional purposes, as well as value signals such as country of origin labelling.

a. Greens Country of Origin Labelling – aimed at implementing the Blewett Review and providing consumers with clear and accurate information about where the food is from, not conflating food processing with where it was grown.

b. The AFGC responded to the Greens’ bill by raising concerns that it would remove the ‘Made in Australia’ labelling which support a recognition of local food processing. Work with us to find an alternative, rather than persisting with that label which confuses Australians as to where the food was grown. We welcome their engagement with us.

Corporate responsibility & the future of Australia’s food

To be credible and trusted by the Australian community in tackling these major challenges, the food industry must prove its bonafides. Undoubtedly in some areas, it is. For example work with Food Bank & other charitable redistribution companies to help both reduce waste and provide food for Australians going hungry is highly commendable.

But there are other areas where the industry has been less willing to acknowledge the need for change:

Overwhelmingly Australians want clearer food labelling, for health, to support local growers and to be able to make ethical choices. Examples include traffic light labelling to help inform health choices, palm oil, country of origin labelling, GM labelling. But industry has just successfully moved us backwards by defeating moves to ensure that health claims on food are independently tested before they are made on packaging.

Similarly, seemingly at the behest of a few, not the majority of the Food & Grocery Council’s members, have been lobbying against container deposit legislation. Container deposit legislation is a 30 year success in South Australia, has not crippled industry, and the scheme is overwhelmingly supported by the Australian community who want to do more to reduce our waste. Why resist it?

Acknowledging the self-regulation cannot deliver key aspects of our food system, and that some regulation is not the enemy of a prosperous and successful industry.

Supporting these measures is in the industry’s interest. It will take significant public investment to ensure that Australia has a sustainable and resilient food system. The more the food industry insists it all be left to the market, the more likely it is to find itself building future prosperity on a rotten foundation due to the severe environmental constraints we have yet to fully come to grips with.

The Australian community is deeply interested in the origins and implications of where our food comes from, how it is made and distributed. We have seen an explosion in farmers’ markets, local food growing, concern over key ethical issues such as animal welfare, the long-term prospects for our farmers, our vulnerability to climate change. Because of industry resistance particularly on issues such as clearer food labelling, there is a trust deficit.

We have seen with the Alan Jones episode recently what has happened with the coming together of a gradual shift in public mood and social media. In my view the food industry needs to look at the trends that are coming very fast, recognise how fast change can occur if you don’t tap into the national mood which at some point tips over, and then there is a massive assault which leads to disruption and change at a faster level than you might have imagined.

So I will urge you to think about the Food Plan and see it as a last century food plan, a business as usual food plan, and think about the challenges facing it and how a national food plan genuinely includes the whole government if you take into account the infrastructure we need to build, the trade policies we need to build, the competition policies we need to have, the sustainability and environmental regulation we need to have, but pick up on the trends and recognise that the coming of the NBN and social media revolution changes everything in terms of consumer power and engagement with food production and the values that consumers have in relation to the food that they eat.

•Christine Milne
Australian Greens Leader

And

Adam Bandt
Greens Deputy Leader

Thursday 11 October 2012

Joint press conference

Subjects: ICAC, whistleblowers, contracts for closure, PBO, Parliamentary integrity, Newstart, single parents, carbon price linkage with the European scheme, CFMEU function

Transcript

CHRISTINE MILNE: The Greens have been continuing to be a major force not only for stability but for increased innovation and new ideas. The Greens have campaigned strongly for a national ICAC, we think it is really important that we have an overview of the public service and the Parliament. The Government has not supported that nor has the Coalition and we have just moved to try to have the release of documents pertaining to public disclosure, that its whistleblowers.

I think all Australians would like to think that people in the public service who want to blow the whistle on corruption or maladministration ought to be enabled to do so but again we have had the Coalition and the Government move together to prevent the release of documents on why the Government is delaying moving on whistleblowers. They said in 2007 they would move to protect whistleblowers, they’ve been backing off it ever since and today we’ve got the absolute evidence that neither the Government nor the Coalition want to be able to protect whistleblowers and that is in spite of the big scandal we’ve got with Securancy and the Reserve Bank for example and of course the Tenix scandal to come as well, so we really need whistleblower legislation in this Parliament and today is a real line in the sand where the Greens have been trying to get continuous improvement in policies and in proper processes and the Parliament has voted against it. The Prime Minister and the leader of the Opposition clearly do not want decent disclosure.

At the same time we have been moving for continuous improvement in relation to the clean energy package. As part of the multi-party climate committee the Greens worked very hard to get a balanced approach whereby we manage to drive investment in renewable energy with the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, $10 billion going into that and we argued against masses of compensation for the dirtiest brown coal generators around the country. Unfortunately the Government persisted in insisting that billion dollars upfront, and many free permits were five and half billion in total would go to those very dirty polluting generators, and so as part of the package we also got the agreement then that up to 2,000 megawatts of the dirtiest brown coal would be bought out. That was the deal that was arrived at.

The Government made a decision to abandon contracts for closure, to abandon the idea of buying out those dirty coal-fired power stations and so we have moved to say, right, well it’s time to look at the package again, if the dirtiest power stations didn’t think it was worth their while to be bought out because the generosity of the compensation was so great, it’s time to look at that. Perfectly reasonable to send for review the question of is the compensation for the coal-fired generators too generous? A reasonable thing to ask, a reasonable thing for the Productivity Commission to be asked but unfortunately both the Government and the Coalition don’t want any real scrutiny of just how generous the community is being to supporting the dirtiest coal-fired power stations. This is a wrong move from the Government and the Coalition but it shows full well but when it comes to accelerating our efforts to address climate change, when push comes to shove neither the Government nor the Coalition will move on the generosity of their compensation to coal-fired generators.

ADAM BANDT: Labor made a clear commitment to people and to the planet that it was going to phase out some of the dirtiest, most polluting coal-fired power stations like Hazelwood in Victoria. It was on that basis that the Greens agreed to what we felt was a necessary but certainly overgenerous compensation to these coal-fired power stations. Labor then broke that commitment and it’s only right that then the climate change package be rebalanced and that we have a look at why we are giving $275 for every woman, man and child in this country to dirty polluting power stations to stay open instead of replacing them with clean and renewable energy. We tried today in the House of Representatives to have the independent Productivity Commission review whether or not the assistance that’s been given to these polluters is too generous and we believe it is however that is part of the reason that the generators said that they could stay open. We should be phasing out dirty coal-fired power stations and making way for clean and renewable energy, especially in Victoria. We weren’t successful in the House of Representatives but we’ll have another go at it when it comes to the Senate.

Also just briefly in the House of Representatives just a little while ago I’m very pleased that the Parliament has supported a Greens push for greater transparency and honesty in the policies that parties take to elections. One of the key conditions of the Greens supporting the Labor Party in the formation of Government was that we established an independent Parliamentary Budget Office which is going to cost parties’ policies in the lead up to an election, so that people know how much a policy will cost and where the money will come from. The Greens have made a commitment that we will use that PBO that we helped establish in the lead up to the next election and now today Parliament has urged everyone else including the Coalition to do the same. We hear a lot of attacks from the Coalition about economic responsibility, well now the question will be as to whether or not the Coalition is prepared to submit its own election policies to the Parliamentary Budget Office in the lead up to the next election because the Greens will and you’ll find that the Greens will be the most economically responsible party going into the next election because we will be the only ones who are explaining where the money will come from to fund the services and infrastructure that we need in this country and also how much these important initiatives will cost.

JOURNALIST: On that vote, wasn’t the original motion to request the Greens release about 12 pages of its own costings, you have amended that to require all parties to put costings to the PBO, isn’t that effectively blocking transparency, are you not refusing to release those costings?

ADAM BANDT: The creation of the PBO and the arrangement that we had to use Treasury and the Finance Department in the interim is based on a very clear principle and that is that parties should be able to go and get independent costings of their policies and then judge whether or not they’re going to proceed with them and that’s what, that’s the principle underlining the arrangements that we’ve had up until now and the principle underlining the PBO. And I think that’s good, I think that’s what the Australian people would want, is that before you announce an idea you’ve tested it and worked out how much it will cost and if you decide that something’s unaffordable then you might not proceed with it. In any event we have in fact released most of the policies that we’ve had costed by Treasury up to date, you’ve read about those in the newspapers.

JOURNALIST: Can I ask you about another matter, we’ve had a debate on integrity over the last week, do you believe there’s an issue about parliamentary standards and if so do what would you propose to lift the standards in Parliament at the moment?

CHRISTINE MILNE: Well it doesn’t matter how many codes of conduct that you have, it doesn’t really, the frameworks are not what counts, what counts is the attitude of members of Parliament to the institution of the Parliament and to the institutions like the Speaker and the President. It really is incumbent on all members of Parliament now to recognise that the community has lost a degree of confidence in the Parliament of Australia because of the behaviour of some of the members and so I think what we can all learn from it is let’s get on and let’s restore the confidence of the community in the Parliament by doing what we’ve been elected to do and that is to go in and debate issues and debate them in a civilised and constructive manner and to that end I would particularly invite the Coalition to rethink its position. It came into this period of shared Parliament, shared power in the Parliament with a view of wrecking it, of driving the Parliament to instability to try to force another election. It hasn’t happened, it hasn’t happened and it won’t happen, the Government will go full term. So now we have the opportunity, now have a new Speaker and Deputy Speaker, we’ve had this experience, we’ve all got an opportunity to say, right, now we are going to offer stable government to the people of Australia and we’re going to improve standards in debate and behaviour and it comes down to every individual member of Parliament doing that but I assure you that the Greens will continue to do what we have been doing throughout this period, and that is offer real leadership in terms of stable government. We have been the most stable part of this period of government and we will continue to be so and we will also continue to be constructive and respectful in the way we conduct ourselves in the Parliament.

JOURNALIST: Do you have concerns that the Government is turning its back on low-paid workers?

CHRISTINE MILNE: I have a real concern about what is clearly a hypocritical position for the Government. On the one hand they say that they represent Labor values and in the next breath they say that the surplus is so sacred that they are prepared to cut the entitlement for single parents, for example and that they refused to increase the Newstart allowance, they refuse to look at ways in which we can genuinely reduce poverty in Australia by actually driving people deeper into poverty and people who are in that position are less able to find work than otherwise. So let’s have some genuine engagement. If the surplus is so sacred to the Government then it needs to work with the Greens to raise the money so that we can deliver for everyone and we can deliver dental care, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, we can implement the Gonski review for example, but if the Government won’t raise revenue and continues to reach a surplus on the back of the most vulnerable Australians then you have to say that Labor values don’t count for much.

JOURNALIST: Can you comment please on the carbon price scheme that passed the House of Representatives a little while ago which means that the ETS will be linked to the price in Europe.

CHRISTINE MILNE: Yes I can. Part of the Greens’ engagement with carbon pricing is to make sure that we try to improve the scheme and continuous improvement means we will be campaigning to lift the level of ambition in the face of the science which shows that global warming is acelerating but also we want to make sure that we deliver certainty to business by having a clear price curve for them to follow. When we saw that there was an opportunity to link with the European Union we thought that that was a really good opportunity to give business a forward price trajectory that they could go to a look at and it also means that come 2018 there will be no dislocation in Australia. From 2015 the price will be the European price and by 2018 I would expect that the European price will be greater than the floor price would have been so I think it’s a good thing, it links the two trading scheme and it gets us into a good position with that experience to consider linking with other schemes as they develop over time and it’s been great today to know there’s been a briefing in the House on the Chinese pilot scheme which although a pilot scheme, is still a really huge contribution to learning experiences with emissions trading.

JOURNALIST: Were any of the Greens Parliamentarians at the union function last night where offensive comments were believed to have been made, and if so did those people leave?

ADAM BANDT: Which function?

JOURNALIST: The CFMEU

ADAM BANDT: I was there up until the entrée, so I don’t know what comments that you’re referring to. What are the comments?

CHRISTINE MILNE: I think you were probably the only one there –

ADAM BANDT: I was the only one there up until the entrée so I don’t think I heard anything.

CHRISTINE MILNE: As far as I know, I’ve only been told this morning so I don’t think any one of my members was there, but essentially you would think given the experience over the last few days, the comments that have been made, the sexist and misogynist remarks, that it might have been appropriate for that to be taken into consideration, it’s not appropriate where ever it is.