Category Archives: Corporate control of food

advocate, Co-operatives, Corporate control of food, New market mechanisms, Supermarket Duopoly

Heinz Meanz Mean

Co-operation in the Goulburn Valley

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, on 31.3.12.

The spirit of co-operation lives – in the Goulburn Valley town of Girgarre. And just as the original Rochdale ethic of co-operation was born of the necessity of finding reliable sources of non-adulterated food, so the turn to co-operation in Girgarre has also been driven by necessity. Not of finding safe food, but of safeguarding jobs, businesses and livelihoods.

This necessity materialised when the chill winds of ‘globalisation’ swept through Girgarre (pop: 633) and the surrounding district. Those winds took the form of an announcement in May 2011 by the Heinz Corporation that it was closing its tomato processing plant and laying off 146 workers. Estimates suggest another 450 jobs will disappear through the flow-on effects; and the livelihoods of many tomato growers will also be put at risk.

Globalisation dictates that capital must flow to those places where it can be most profitably invested. In this instance, that ‘law’ required the closure of three Heinz factories in Australia and their relocation to lower cost New Zealand. The tomatoes will be sourced from even lower-cost Thailand. In announcing the closure, Heinz took a side swipe at Australia’s highly concentrated supermarket sector as a major reason why it was no longer profitable to maintain their operations here.

Within weeks of the closure being announced, a coalition of growers, workers and others in the local community began exploring what I would term ‘the Argentinian solution’. In late 2001, as the Argentinian economy was imploding under the burden of an unpayable debt, and workers were being laid off in their tens of thousands, a movement known as the fabricas recuperadas – ‘recovered factories’ – began.

What these workers did was not simply ‘occupy’ their workplaces in pursuit of demands for better wages and conditions. They literally took them over and made them productive as going concerns, run as co-operatives, in order to preserve their own jobs and livelihoods. Even as the economy has recovered, many of these worker co-ops have continued to exist, and some have thrived. The movement has been immortalised in The Take, a 2004 documentary made by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis.

The Take - the story of the 'recovered factories' movement in Argentina
The Take – the story of the ‘recovered factories’ movement in Argentina

What’s distinctive about Girgarre is that it’s not just workers involved in the push for the take-over (via purchase) of the Heinz factory and its rebirth as a co-op. It’s the workers in co-operation with the growers; and both in co-operation with the broader community. Remember that the history of co-operation in Australia has been marred by mutual suspicion between producer and consumer co-operatives, translating into a palpable failure to co-operate. This is a conscious attempt to turn a new page in that history.

One of the leading figures in this effort, Tony Webb of University Technology Sydney, told me that:

“The idea grew from just simply replacing Heinz with its out-dated model of competitive relations with suppliers and customers and production of a limited range of internationally branded products for the retail market.  We want to develop new niche markets in the retail and food service sectors for a wider range of agricultural products. The co-op will integrate local warehousing and distribution logistics and a regional food industry training centre on-site, and incorporate sustainable energy, water and waste practices into the production facilities. In short, it aims to build co-operative links between many of the elements of the paddock-to-plate food chain as part of a sustainable regional food hub.”

The breadth of this ambition, and the spirit of co-operation that the initiative has inspired to date, has also crossed party political lines, with the Goulburn Valley Food Action Committee (find it on Facebook!) attracting significant local, national and international interest. Celebrity Chef, Peter Russell Clarke, is helping out with the marketing campaign. Offers of finance to buy and equip the factory have been made.

Meanwhile, Heinz is refusing to sell the site to the co-operative, rejecting their offer of $750,000, three times what the company paid twenty years earlier. Worse, they have, according to Webb and his colleague Les Cameron of the National Food Institute, engaged in a ‘scorched earth’ policy of ‘industrial vandalism’ by stripping the plant of any and all equipment of value, even down to the rat-proof fencing.

But now momentum has been generated and the co-op members have the bit between their teeth. They are looking for a greenfield site, and are launching a campaign for one million Australians to contribute $50 each to become members of a national venture aimed at inspiring – and financing – similar Food Hub ventures elsewhere.

What’s a Food Hub, I hear you ask? More on that next time.

Update, October 2013 – The GV Food Co-op is now trading and inviting supportive members of the public to join as members. To learn more, visit their website: http://www.gvfoodcoop.com.au/

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advocate, Alternatives, Corporate control of food, Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm

Nature as a “free gift”

Nature as a free gift

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 7th January 2012

Last time I discussed, in the spirit of Christmas, the tremendous and little-acknowledged extent to which our monetary economy depends for its continued successful functioning on countless daily acts of generosity, especially by carers and parents.

It also depends on the seemingly endless generosity of nature, which is almost always taken for granted. The idea of treating nature as a ‘free gift’ to humanity – our tendency to ‘treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves’, as the famous German economist and author of Small is Beautiful, Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, put it – has its immediate roots in the thought of the founding fathers of our modern market economy: Adam Smith, David  Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Malthus. 

small is beautiful 1st ed cover m

Arguably it goes back much further than that, to the very founding stories of our Judeo-Christian culture: to a certain interpretation of the Book of Genesis, according to which God created the world, then created and placed humans in it, and gave them dominion over all living and non-living things. This is of course not the only interpretation of the creation story – another is that the role of humans vis-à-vis nature is not as ‘masters’, but as stewards – but it is the conventional and predominant one.

Treating nature as a ‘free gift’ has certain consequences. Most obviously, as Schumacher noted, it means that we ascribe no value (in monetary terms) to resources such as clean air and healthy soils. That’s dangerous, in a culture in which most of us understand something as ‘valuable’ only when there’s a price tag attached to it. It sets up an unhealthy dynamic between private riches, in various forms of property, and public wealth, in the form of resources that everyone, of necessity, shares.

According to the theory which underpins our market economy,  a monetary value can only be affixed to goods and services which are exchanged, because they are said to exist in a condition (either actual or constructed) of ‘scarcity’. Public wealth, on the other hand, is said to exist in abundance, and as such is not susceptible to monetary exchange.

The difficulty is that as private riches increase, public wealth diminishes. This dynamic is endemic to much of modern production, in agriculture as elsewhere. Coal-seam gas mining is a prime example: extraction of the resource brings profits to mining companies, but at the cost of depleting and polluting underground water tables.  

More than two hundred years ago the eighth Earl of Lauderdale, James Maitland, foresaw this destructive tension between an expanding sphere of private riches and a diminishing realm of public wealth. We live daily with manifestations of the ‘Lauderdale paradox’, perhaps the most severe of which is climate change. As the private wealth generated by our market economy has expanded exponentially in the past two centuries, the ‘liveable space’ provided by a stable climate appears to be rapidly diminishing for future generations.

You might think that the obvious answer to this paradox would be to put a price on the most essential aspects of ‘public wealth’; to treat them as ‘scarce’, and subject them to the laws of supply and demand. We pay for waste water to be treated; and from the middle of this year, we will be paying for the emission of carbon into the atmosphere, as the first step towards a full-fledged ‘emissions trading scheme’. But markets always produce winners and losers; and there are real questions as to whether an ETS will be an effective way to tackle climate change, much less a fair one. 

A lot depends on what we understand by ‘scarcity’; and, fundamentally, what our relationship to nature is, or should be. Many farmers, here and round the world, already see themselves as ‘stewards’, not ‘masters’, of the land they inhabit. There is a great deal of wisdom in such a perspective, and it points the way to a truly ‘sustainable’ future.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Demographic crisis, Ecological constraints, Food sovereignty, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

The poverty of farming in the Tweed

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The poverty of farming in the Tweed

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, on 10th December 2011

Last time I introduced Tweed mango grower Mike Yarrow, whom I met recently while in Murwillumbah as part of a team working with the Tweed Council to prepare a strategy for sustainable agriculture.

Mike would like this process to be a success, but he believes that it’s ’30 or 40 years too late’, at least in the case of him and his wife; and other farmers of their vintage (Mike is 67), which is the vast majority of farmers in the region.

Your problem as I see it”, he told us, “is that we, the farmers, have reached the end of our working lives. There are no new young farmers.

The aging of the farming population is an issue that affects the country as a whole. By far the largest category of farmers in Australia is in the 65+ age bracket. In this as in other aspects of food policy, the Federal Government has made the complacent assumption that there is really nothing to worry about, and that what objectively appears to be a demographic crisis will simply correct itself over time. Projections issued after the Australia 2020 Summit in 2008 saw the age of the average Australian farmer peaking in 2011 at just under 55 years, and then gradually declining past 2030.

mangos

Yet no convincing explanation was given as to where the next generation of Australian farmers would come from. On the contrary, all the indications are that the decades-long trend of an aging rural workforce is likely to continue. According to Mike Yarrow, the heart of the issue lies in what he calls ‘the deliberately destroyed profitability’ of farmers.

In Mike’s view, successive Federal Governments wanted ‘to keep the lid on industrial unrest by keeping the gap between a worker’s income and the cost of living apart’. He recalls that when he and his wife arrived in Australia in 1974, petrol was 7 cents a litre, and the minimum wage was $1 an hour. Both have since risen about 20-fold, in line with general cost of living increases. A box of fruit, on the other hand, was $10 in 1974 – and hasn’t gone up much.

You could take issue with Mike; dismiss him as a conspiracy theorist; say that the Government has never intended to screw farmers; that it’s simply a case of the way the markets (and supermarkets) operate. But that’s exactly his point.

By de-regulating rural industries, opening Australia to cheaper imported produce, and generally ‘letting market forces rip’, the market has done what it always does. It’s a competitive system, and it produces winners and losers. In this case, the losers happen to be the majority of Australia’s farmers, and the big winners have been Australia’s two major supermarkets, whose market share has more than doubled since the mid-1970s.

You could argue that in delivering ‘cheap food’ for shoppers, the Australian public as a whole have also ‘won’ in this process.  Yet as five farmers continue to leave the land every day, and very few are stepping into their shoes, the question remains: who is going to produce our food for the rest of this century, and beyond? Agriculture may be less than 3% of Australia’s GDP, but to understand its significance only through an economist’s eyes is unbelievably naïve and short-sighted.

At a deeper level, Mike is quite right. The market system – capitalism – has always depended on ‘cheap food’, in one form or another, to drive its major cycles of expansion. In the Industrial Revolution, it was sugar from the slave plantations of the Caribbean. Last century, it was the mountains of corn made possible by hybrid seeds, agro-chemicals and cheap oil. This century they tell us agricultural productivity will be driven by ‘environmentally-benign’ GM technologies. Meanwhile, food prices are starting to rise, and food riots are becoming more common. Food is too important to take for granted, and so are farmers. We need to be asking some hard questions.

Coffs Coast, Community gardening, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Food sovereignty, Global hunger, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies, National Food Plan, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Uncategorized

Interview: Nick Rose

Thanks to Juliette Anich for the opportunity to create this portrait. Being able to explain at length my motivations is a rare opportunity and much appreciated.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Global hunger, Local and regional food economies, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly, Uncategorized

Of thuggery and utopia

16th October – World Food Sovereignty Day

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 15.10.11

16 October is World Food Day. It commemorates the day in 1945 on which the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations was established. The FAO is the pre-eminent global institution charged with working towards universal food security: its mandate is to ‘raise levels of nutrition, improve agricultural productivity, better the lives of rural populations and contribute to the growth of the world economy’.

This year, the theme of World Food Day is ‘food prices – from crisis to stability’. Food price volatility in recent years has seen the numbers of malnourished increase significantly. Commemorative events will be held around the world, such as the ‘World Food Day Sunday Dinners’ being held across the US.

Some social movements believe that such actions are no longer sufficient, and that a rather more dramatic change in direction is needed. So they are now commemorating 16 October in a different way, by renaming it, ‘World Food Sovereignty Day’.

Two months ago, 400 (mostly young) people from 34 European countries, met for a week in Krems, Austria, to talk about what was happening to Europe, their futures, and their food systems, in the context of the increasing application of austerity programs being dictated by financial markets.

Food Sovereignty Forum in Krems, Austria, 2011
Food Sovereignty Forum in Krems, Austria, 2011

Prefiguring the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement a month later and its focus on the unfairness and inequalities of what Dick Smith calls ‘extreme capitalism’, they denounced the ‘model of industrialised agriculture controlled by a few transnational food corporations together with a small group of huge retailers’. This model, they said, had little interest in producing ‘food which is healthy, affordable and benefits people’, but was rather focused ‘on the production of raw materials such as agrofuels, animal feeds [and] commodity plantations’.

In Australia, Dick Smith has recently been talking about the ‘thuggery’ practiced by major supermarket chains, and how this silences and intimidates processors and farmers. In other countries, such as Honduras, there is thuggery of a rather more extreme version. There, following a military coup in June 2009, dozens of farmer leaders have been assassinated by private and state security forces, as they have tried to resist being evicted from their lands by companies in charge of a rapidly expanding palm oil monoculture.

Such examples suggest that the dominant global agri-food model almost seems to have zombie-like characteristics. Unsustainable from every perspective other than corporate balance sheets, it still manages to spread its talons around the world, draining life from ecosystems, forests and rural communities. Its ‘export vocation’, as scholar and food sovereignty activist Peter Rosset puts it, is effectively a ‘model of death’, and contrasts sharply with the ‘food producing vocation’ of smaller-scale farmers.

So what do the young people who attended the European Forum for Food Sovereignty at Krems propose in its stead? In the first place, they demand the democratisation of food and agricultural systems, according to the principles of fundamental human rights, cooperation and solidarity.  Secondly, they want ‘resilient food production systems’, which utilise ecological production methods, and are based on ‘a multitude of smallholder farmers, gardeners and small-scale fishers who produce local food as the backbone of the food system’.

Thirdly, they are calling for decentralised food distribution networks and ‘diversified markets based on solidarity and fair prices’, with ‘intensified relations between producers and consumers in local food webs to counter the expansion and power of supermarkets’. They want dignified and decent working conditions and wages for all food sector workers.

Next, they oppose ‘the commodification, financialisation and patenting of our commons’, including land, seeds, livestock breeds, trees, water and the atmosphere. And finally, they are calling for public policies to support such food systems and food cultures, based firmly on the universal right to food and the satisfaction of basic human needs.

Is all this hopeless utopia, or grounded realism? Increasingly, the growing global food movements are providing the answer to that question.

Collaborative cultures and networks, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Food sovereignty, Global hunger

Fair food from field to fork: food sovereignty

Reflections on the work of the People’s Food Plan process to date in Australia.

It’s a small beginning, there is a long way to go and the work seems daunting in its ambition and its urgency.

But we have to make a start.

Fair food from field to fork: food sovereignty.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Corporate control of food, Global hunger

Food insecurity amidst abundance

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Food Insecurity on the Coffs Coast

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 9.7.11

Last time I wrote about the link between global malnutrition and agri-business profiteering, on the eve of Ugandan farmer Polly Apio’s visit to Bellingen. Now we learn of a looming famine that may affect 10 million people or more in the Horn of Africa. The immediate cause is failed harvests due to prolonged droughts, but the situation is made far worse by soaring commodity prices.

Food insecurity though isn’t only an issue for Africa and other regions in the Global South.

As at 2008, at least 2 million Australians fell into the category of being food insecure, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Those numbers have surely increased in the last three years, taking into account cost of living pressures.

A week ago, power bills in NSW rose by 18%. Between 2008 and 2013, average household electricity bills in this state will double, even without factoring in additional rises that will flow from the introduction of a carbon tax; and they are tipped to rise another 50% from 2013-2016.

For most of us, rising power bills, like rising fuel costs, mortgage payments, rents, and food prices, are something we can deal with. We don’t like it, but we can make adjustments in our household budgets, and at least some of the increased costs are offset by wage rises, or new jobs with better pay.

On the other hand, if you’re among the 2 million plus who are food insecure, these cost of living pressures are a matter of very serious concern.

Being food insecure means that sometimes or quite regularly you struggle to put good food on the table for you and your family. Australians on fixed and low incomes, such as recipients of Centrelink payments and part-time or casual workers in low paying jobs, are those who most likely fall into this category. Others at risk include individuals and families facing crisis situations, such as a job loss or a separation.

There are a number of charitable and government agencies on the Coffs Coast who provide emergency assistance to people in these situations. The Salvation Army, St Vincent’s Paul, Lifehouse Church, the Uniting Church, various Neighbourhood Centres and others are all staffed by teams of dedicated, committed and selfless individuals. They are doing everything in their power to alleviate the hardships of families and individuals facing hardship.

Most of these organisations depend on limited emergency voucher relief systems from the Federal and State Government. In addition, they mobilise their own resources through donations, of both money and food, and sales. Yet they are struggling to keep pace with the growing demand for their services.

This reflects the national trends. Research published in March this year by the Australian Council of Social Services revealed that charitable service providers nationwide have seen a 47% increase in the numbers of eligible people they have had to turn away, compared to the same survey conducted in 2008/9.

The tragic irony of rising food insecurity in a rich country that exports two-thirds of its agricultural products mirrors the bigger scandal of massive global malnutrition in a world of food abundance.

What makes it so much worse is that as much as 50% of all edible food in Australia – 7.5 million tonnes – is actually wasted. It ends up in landfill. Earlier this year Melbourne-based food rescue group SecondBite published research which showed that this food would provide three good meals a day, every day of the year, for over 13 million people.

Coffs Harbour is fortunate to count amongst its residents an inspirational lady by the name of Narelle Milton, who for the past 13 years has been running the Uniting Church soup kitchen in the city centre every week day. Her kitchen, and the food parcels offered by other providers, are now being supported through Food Bank initiatives operated by several supermarkets. This is a start towards redressing the scandals of food insecurity and food waste, but so much more needs to be done.

Next time an interview with Narelle, who received the Order of Australia in 2009 in recognition of her work, will be published in this column.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Global hunger

Ending global hunger means ending the corporate control of food

Ending Global Hunger – is it possible?

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 25.6.11

On Monday 27th June, Uganda farmer and mother of 11, Polly Apio, will be speaking at the Bellingen Uniting Church, from 5.30 – 7.30 p.m.

She is in Australia on a speaking tour, organised by Action Aid, to raise awareness about the reality of hunger as it is experienced around the world, especially in Africa, and especially by women.

There is a common misconception that hunger in today’s world is the result of a lack of food. It seems logical enough, and our political leaders promote it widely.

For example, Trade Minister Craig Emerson travelled to Paris this week to attend the meeting of G20 Agriculture Ministers to discuss food price volatility, and come up with an action plan to address it. His message was that ‘the single most powerful means of dealing with the food security problem is through agricultural trade liberalisation’. In other words, other countries lower trade barriers to Australian products, creating incentives for our farmers and growers to increase production. We help feed the world, and we get new markets and earnings into the bargain. Simple.

The trouble is, this recipe – this ideology – has been promoted and tried for nearly three decades. It hasn’t worked, at least as regards the alleged objectives of combatting food insecurity and providing decent livelihoods for farmers. Since 1980, the numbers of malnourished people worldwide have more than doubled, food price volatility has become endemic as speculators have poured into commodity futures markets, and the terms of trade for most farmers worldwide – Australians included – have steadily worsened.

In any competitive system there are always winners and losers; only in this case, we have well over a billion losers, and a tiny handful of big winners. Among them is the leading grain processing and meat-packing corporation, Cargill. Cargill’s sales have more than doubled since 2000, while its profits have risen 500% to $US2.6 billion in 2010; and that figure is a hefty fall from the $US3.95 billion it earned in 2008, at the height of the last round of extreme food price volatility. So far this year its profits are up nearly 50% on the 2010 figure, once again taking advantage of the sharp rises in commodity prices.

I don’t know about you, but frankly I find something quite obscene in this coincidence between record agri-business profits and the proliferation of mass hunger, poverty and suffering. It says a lot about the naked and callous self-interest that passes for global culture at this point in history.

You won’t of course find this item on the agenda in the ministerial discussions in Paris. Instead, the communiqué calls for greater free trade, increased production, and the more efficient functioning of international commodities markets.

The alternative to this failed agenda for food security is to empower small farmers in the developing world to feed their communities and countries. This used to happen; before the era of trade liberalisation, most sub-Saharan African countries were actually net food exporters. Now they have to import as much as 50% of their food, which makes them highly vulnerable to price shocks.

Incidentally, Australians as a whole don’t eat enough fruit and veg, especially leafy greens, and we don’t produce enough either to meet the recommended daily intake. So before we start telling other countries how to organise their food systems, we should get our own house in order.

Which brings us back to Polly. Ironically, more than half of the malnourished persons in the world are small farmers; and in developing countries, most of the small farmers are women. Supporting them to raise their productive capacities – and to do so sustainably, without creating further dependencies on expensive seeds and chemical inputs – will make large inroads into global hunger.

This is called Food Sovereignty, and it means looking beyond our own self-interest, to stand in solidarity with inspiring leaders like Polly, and to do what we can to help them achieve their vision of dignity and self-determination for their communities. Come along and listen to what she has to say.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Demographic crisis, Small-scale farming

The real costs of cheap food

Food Inc - lifting the lid on the industrialised food system
Food Inc – lifting the lid on the industrialised food system

The real costs of ‘cheap’ food

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 19.2.11

There’s been plenty of talk over the past month or so about the impact that the extreme weather events north of the border will have on food and grocery prices, vegetables and bananas especially.

There’s lots of things to say about this, beginning with the fact that if the mid-north coast still had a viable banana industry, and if production wasn’t so centralised and concentrated in cyclone-prone areas of north Queensland, then consumers might not be so vulnerable to the sorts of price spikes we’re likely to see in the coming months.

Be that as it may, there’s a bigger question at stake which is rarely addressed, and that’s whether the ‘normal’ price we pay for our groceries is sufficient to maintain a healthy, diverse and viable agricultural sector in this country over the medium and long-term, given the way that current market mechanisms operate.

It’s hardly any secret that many farmers are doing it tough, and have done so for a long time. So it should come as no surprise that Australia has lost around 50,000 farmers since the mid-1960s, and the exodus continues, with five farmers leaving the land every day.

Nor should it be any surprise that the average age of the Australian farmer is approaching 60. There simply aren’t the incentives for young people to want to embrace agriculture as a career and lifestyle choice. Which begs the question: who’s going to do the work of feeding us in 15 or 20 years’ time, when most farmers will be approaching 80, and there’ll be 35,000 fewer of them?

Does this sound like a crisis-in-the-making to you? It certainly does to me. In fact, it’s a crisis that’s been with us for many years now.

Which brings us back to the central issue: the proper cost of food. Through the centuries, farmers have always sought a fair price – a just price – for their produce. The trouble in recent decades is that they simply have not been getting it. At the heart of the global crisis in agriculture – Australia is but one of dozens of countries affected – is that farm-gate prices have failed to keep pace with the rising costs of inputs, freight and labour. In many cases farm-gate prices have barely risen at all.

Alongside this cost-price squeeze, we have seen an equally strong trend towards the concentration of ownership and control of most aspects of the food-value chain: from seed, to agro-chemicals, to grain trading and meat-packing, to food processing and manufacturing, and to retailing. We have witnessed the corporatisation and monopolisation of food and agriculture.

Many would say that the two trends  – the farm crisis, and the growth of agri-food monopolies – are closely linked. So closely, that the latter brings about the former.

There’s no simple answer to this, and I’m certainly not advocating a big price hike in groceries for consumers, least of all the many millions of middle and low-income Australians who are experiencing cost-of-living pressures already, with electricity and petrol price rises, not to mention the constantly rising cost of housing. But the question remains: how do we make farming viable – especially for smaller scale, bio-diverse farms – and yet keep food affordable?

We do need to move away from the culture of cheap food, where price is the sole criterion for making purchasing decisions. The logic of the food system as it stands points in one direction: the factory farm. And if you want to know why that’s a future we ought to say no to, come and watch Food Inc: see the interviews with factory farmers and workers in the United States; the conditions in which the animals are kept; the phenomenal waste that is generated, and the severe consequences for human and environmental health. The good news is that there are alternatives, and they’re being implemented all over the world, including on the Coffs Coast.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Cost-price squeeze, Fruit growing, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

The decline of the big banana – Part 2

The story of Bill O’Donnell – Part 2

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 5.2.11

In the second of a three-part interview, veteran Coffs Coast fruit grower Bill O’Donnell talks about his peach and nectarine orchards, and how his lifeline to farm-based economic viability was ultimately ended by the inflexible application of regulations.

Bill left banana growing in the early 1970s and took himself off travelling for some years. He also kept up his passion for fun-running, and even the occasional marathon – hence the nick-name, ‘Runner Bill’.

On his return to Australia and the Coffs Coast, he took up professional book-making, which he continued, fairly successfully, for the next two decades. Bill wanted to go back to fruit growing, because, as he puts it, he had ‘too much physical energy’.

He purchased a badly run-down 200-acre dairy property a few kilometres from the Bundagen multiple occupancy community. He spent the first few years cleaning up the farm, and then he had to make it pay, because the book-making started to go bad – ‘the crowds weren’t going to the races any more’.

Bill tells how he made ‘a couple of false starts’:

“I put in an orchard of oranges, which was alright, insofar as you could grow lovely oranges, but you couldn’t sell them. I had the first lychee plantation in the district, but that got wrecked in a gale – so I gave that away, and anyway I had the wrong variety.”

It was the local rep from the Golden Dawn agent who then advised him to go for tropical peaches and nectarines, early fruiting varieties. Bill put in 2800 trees – 1800 peaches and 1000 nectarines – in 1986, and they began fruiting two years later. But he was caught unawares by a ‘real stinker of a problem – the [fruit] bats’:

“.. I could sit at my place, and it was like watching the Luftwaffe coming over in the Battle of Britain. The first three or four would come, and then three or four hundred, and… then 30 and 40 thousand. You couldn’t sleep at night. And they broke the trees down… they’d just get so full of peaches and nectarines, and they were that heavy, and [the bats would] just break the branches down. It was just a complete disaster – I spent maybe $70-$80,000, looking to get a return, and I just lost it all. Never got a quid… There were peach seeds on the highway, from the Sawtell turnoff to the Bellingen turnoff – it was awful, a horrible experience.”

Not a man to be deterred, Bill committed himself much more deeply to his new orchard:

“So I had to net them. We had to trim all the broken branches, and it cost $90,000 to net the place. This was before I got any return. It took me a long while to get over that – that was when we were paying 16-17% interest. And I had to do it in one hit, if I wanted to survive, I had to protect the trees. It was crippling. But we overcame it…”

The trees recovered quickly, and Bill harvested a good crop the next year, which he sold through Paul Bayliss at Golden Dawn, of whom he speaks very highly. When Paul left, Bill sent his fruit to Melbourne through a ‘terrific little Italian bloke’ that Paul recommended.

And for a while all was good – but then Bill found that while his costs – wages, freight, packing – were rising, the price wasn’t. Why? “Because the supermarkets [have] conditioned the people to pay bugger all for their fruit.”

So at that point the ‘only solution for me was to go local, with the roadside stall in Bonville [8 weeks a year], and the Sunday markets, and that kept the show going.’ Bill’s roadside stall out of the Bonville caravan park was highly successful, and extremely popular.

The stall lasted 14 years, but ultimately its success was its undoing, as other fruit vendors complained to the council that Bill’s stall was a ‘traffic hazard’. The first council officer to investigate the complaints took a reasonably relaxed approach, but in the last couple of years another officer took a very hard-line approach, and Bill was forced to close the stall.

And the trees? All bulldozed, and the netting’s gone too.

Bill O'Donnell in the field where his peach and nectarine orchard used to be
Bill O’Donnell in the field where his peach and nectarine orchard used to be