The National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) tells us Australia can produce enough food for 75 million people. While we certainly have the ability, anecdotal evidence would suggest it is not currently the case.
As such, we desperately need a thorough assessment of what our nation is capable of growing and how many people we can realistically feed.
Over the past two decades, the last one in particular, massive volumes of water which were used to grow food have been pared back from agriculture. This has especially occurred in the NSW Murray, Murrumbidgee and Northern Victoria regions which have been forced to bear the brunt of changed government policy.
If the water acquired by the government had been put to good use, Australians might be satisfied with this direction. Unfortunately, we have seen policy decisions based on flawed science and a throng of politicians not prepared to admit the mistakes they have made (which are obvious to those of us living in the affected regions).
Now, I suspect they are not prepared to admit the real reason why many supermarket shelves are bare and will continue to be thus until we make some changes.
There are some indisputable facts which tell me we have a looming crisis. The Canberra-based NFF bureaucracy needs to get its collective head out of the sand and work to fix the problem, rather than telling all and sundry that everything is rosy.
Here are the facts:
- We once exported 80% of the rice we grew. In recent years we have been unable to grow enough rice for domestic consumption and we are now trying to import rice. That’s why there is none on the supermarket shelves!
- We are importing wheat for bread and flour production. We are not growing enough for our pasta production, which is also in desperately short supply.
- We are being forced to import more dairy products due to the decline in the number of dairies, especially in irrigation communities, because they cannot get enough water to grow feed for cows. As such were are importing dairy products to meet domestic needs.
Wake up Australia! If this COVID-19 pandemic teaches us nothing else, surely we will learn the lessons from being too reliant on other countries for so many of life’s essentials, none more so than food.
Governments must support our farmers and the NFF must stop trying to sugar-coat this serious national issue.
Yours faithfully
Dudley Bryant
President
North Victorian Irrigation Communities
