There’s a reason the people in the ad used to say ‘not happy, Jan’. I spend a lot of my working week being not happy about things on behalf of farmers – prices, input costs, imports, red tape, green tape just to name a few. It’s an occupational hazard.
For balance, on the weekends I try to be calm and serene. Truly.
But it doesn’t always work.
Reading a letter to the editor in the Weekend Australian magazine recently made me choke on my Weetbix.
The correspondent alleged that Australia’s primary producers wallow “in the luxury of taxpayer-funded protectionism” that allows them to “weep over the dashboard of the Range Rover” as they contemplate the pricing policies of Coles and Woolworths, the good guys in the food chain who try to keep prices down for consumers.
I was dismayed to think that some people might really think farmers are like that – when nothing could be further from the truth. That stereotype was more appropriate for our European cousins in the early days of the Common Market, or US farmers supported by the iniquitous Farm Bills. In both cases, farmers have been subsidised to overproduce – or paid not to produce at all.
Fortunately, before I had stuck the stamp on the envelope on the scathing reply I’d dashed off, I came across an article by the Australian Farm Institute’s Mick Keogh. This review of the level of protectionism, or government support, for farmers in OECD countries gave me the facts to back up my heated response.
The study confirms that government support measures for Australian farmers are the lowest for any developed nation on earth, when expressed as a percentage of national GDP.
This is what the chart looks like:
If you include funding for research and development (to which farmers must contribute their own matching dollars) and natural disaster assistance, Australia provides the equivalent of a mere 0.16 per cent of GDP as support to agriculture. This is the lowest percentage of any developed nation.
The study then looked at another measure: the percentage of a farmer’s income attributable to government support and assistance. This time, Australian farmers ranked second lowest in the OECD, just behind our Kiwi mates. The figure here is just three per cent; while the average support in for farmers across the OECD countries is a massive18.8 per cent.
Keogh comments:
“No doubt there will be grateful outpourings of gratitude and support from the Australian community and media for what is effectively for taxpayers the cheapest agriculture sector in the world, providing safe and nutritious food and earning 15 per cent of Australia’s export income in the almost complete absence of any government or taxpayer support measures.”
In your dreams.
Farmers have to deal with the unreasonable expectation that food prices will continue to fall, even when input costs are rising exponentially. They face ever-increasing bureaucracy and regulation by governments. They have to cope with finger-wagging instant experts demanding ever-more restrictive standards which are not required of imported competitor products. Worse still, every day they face dismissive and derogatory attitudes like those expressed by the writer of that letter to the editor.
Instead of appreciating the work that our farmers do to deliver outstanding food and fibre products, Australians generally take their food for granted. They’ve never been hungry. They expect to go into a shop any day of the week and be able to purchase any type of food, whether or not it is in season. They expect that produce to be perfect in every way. They never question that it will be safe to put into their mouths. And, to top it off, they expect that – unlike any other product – their food will continue to decrease in price.
And for years our farmers have delivered all that in spades. But their capacity to continue to do this is fast running out. Unless we wake up to ourselves, these pressures will drive them out of business.
Bring on a level playing field – before it is too late.
