Category Archives: Supermarket Duopoly

agroecology, Argentina, Capitalism, Churchill Trip 2014, Collaborative cultures and networks, Community gardening, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Ecology, economics, fair food movement, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Local and regional food economies, Supermarket Duopoly, Urban agriculture

Food Tank interviews Dr Nick Rose

Republished from Foodtank – original article here – Interview with Dr. Nick Rose, Australian Food System Activist – Food Tank

Food Tank recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Nick Rose, Executive Director at Sustain, about the health of Australia’s food system and his view on what are the key factors impacting on a healthy and resilient food system in Australia.

Food Tank (FT): What are some of the biggest opportunities to support Australia’s food system?

Nick Rose (NR): The single biggest opportunity lies in the field of education, with the introduction for 2017 of a paddock-to-plate food literacy curriculum, Food Studies, as an elective for all Grade 11 and 12 students in Victoria, Australia’s second-most populous state. As a result, in a few years, as many as 10,000 students could be taking Food Studies. These students will form a growing cohort of capable tertiary graduates who can inform and lead the development of good food policy at the local, state and federal government levels. If other states follow Victoria’s lead and introduce a Food Studies curriculum, the wave of food systems change generated by tens of thousands of highly informed and motivated youth will, I think, be irresistible.

Other significant opportunities include the embrace and resourcing of sustainable and regenerative forms of food production, as well as the expansion of new and fair distribution systems and enterprises, such as farmers markets and food hubs. Legislative and planning protections for Australia’s major food bowl areas close to capital cities are sorely needed. Governments at all levels have a crucial role to play in these and other necessary shifts.

FT: With increasing innovation in the food system and networking technologies, what are you most excited about?

NR: I’m excited about creating a dynamic, multi-layered, and searchable food systems directory that will, for the first time, reveal the scale and breadth of Australia’s growing food systems movement. The development of this directory is a project that Sustain is now working on, with the support of the Myer Foundation, and we’re looking forward to making it a reality in 2017.

FT: From your extensive travels, what are some successful innovations in other countries that could be applied in Australia to improve the food system?

NR: I have a strong personal interest in the great potential of urban agriculture to transform the food system as a whole, and I saw dozens of examples of innovations on my Churchill Fellowship visiting the mid-west United States, Toronto, and Argentina in July–September 2014. Those innovations include: community urban land trusts to make city and peri-urban land available for sustainable and intensive food production, education, and social justice; capturing large organic waste streams to support sustainable and highly productive urban agricultural systems; planning overlays and zoning to facilitate commercial-scale urban agriculture production; the multiplication of inner-city farmers markets with dedicated space for urban farmers; the establishment of small-scale artisanal food processing facilities to incubate food entrepreneurs; the facilitation of city-wide urban agricultural networks; and, the development of comprehensive and inclusive urban agricultural strategies that recognize, value, and support the work of urban farmers and the organizations they are embedded in.

FT: How do organizations and individuals get involved in supporting a healthy and resilient food system in Australia?

NR: There are so many points of entry for individuals, from growing some herbs and vegetables, to supporting a kitchen garden at your local school (as a parent) and, or, your local community garden (more than 500 across Australia). Also, shopping at your local farmers market (now more than 180 in Australia) and, or, fair food enterprise, supporting local and sustainable producers wherever possible. Major change is needed at the level of policy, legislation and regulation, and here organizations can make a difference by joining one of the many local and regional food alliances that are in existence around Australia, or forming one if it doesn’t already exist in your region.

FT: If you could change one thing in Australia to improve its food system, what would it be?

NR: The single biggest obstacle in my view is the concentration of economic and political power represented by the supermarket duopoly—Coles and Woolworths. In the past 40 years, the grocery market share of these two companies has more than doubled to 75 percent. Meanwhile, Australia has lost more than 40 percent of its farmers, with the average age of farmers now approaching 60 years, compared to 42 years for the workforce as a whole. These two trends are deeply connected. As a country, we need to confront our tolerance for oligopolistic concentrations of political-economic power, and the supermarkets present the most urgent task, regarding the long-term sustainability and fairness of our food system.

FT: What personally drives your work to improve Australia’s food system?

NR: My drive stems from years living in Guatemala (2000–2006). It was here my political consciousness was awakened on realizing that the deaths of 200,000 Guatemalans, mostly Mayan indigenous peoples, could be traced to the refusal by the United Fruit Corporation and the then U.S. government of President Eisenhower to countenance even the partial redistribution of its massive landholdings and excessive wealth. This story is all documented in Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the CIA in Guatemala. It was a book that changed my life.

I believe that in working to improve Australia’s food system, I am part of a huge and growing global movement to transform the world’s food system. I dedicate my efforts to the memory of those who died in the struggle for a fair Guatemala.

agroecology, Corporate control of food, economics, fair food movement, Local and regional food economies, Supermarket Duopoly, Urban agriculture

”In the mainstream Australian food system, it’s the supermarkets that hold most of the power”

Republished from Gourmet Traveller – original article at Dr Nick Rose of Sustain: The Australian Food Network on our broken food systems | Gourmet Traveller

I have been directly inspired by the visionary work of Dr Nick Rose, as he motivates all of us to celebrate and raise awareness of Australia’s urban agricultural movement. Nick is an excellent communicator, with an innate ability to empower those around him.

Together with South Eveleigh’s Aboriginal educator and environmentalist Clarence Slockee (Cudgenburra/Bundjalung), I can’t wait to help Nick spread his important message about food sovereignty within South Eveleigh and beyond.– Kylie Kwong

Dr Nick Rose on food sovereignty and fair food systems

Food sovereignty can be a tricky concept to wrap your head around. But it’s important that we do, says Dr Nick Rose, executive director of Sustain: The Australian Food Network. At its most simple, he says, food sovereignty is about creating a fair food system.”The idea of a fair food system is one that’s fair for farmers – they get a fair price for their produce. It’s fair for consumers – they get affordable food. And it’s fair for the land – it’s ethical and involves caring for country.”For too long, Dr Rose explains, Australians have taken their food system for granted, without thinking about where their food comes from, who grows it, or the impact it has on the land.

“We were left a legacy. When we came here as British colonisers, there was a food bowl here. Bruce Pascoe talks about this; there was a managed landscape that Indigenous people had been caring for, for tens of thousands of years. We’ve been here 240 years and we have, in many ways, devastated large swathes of the country.”

Nick Rose

His mission, through Sustain, is to design and build a fair food system and work alongside communities, councils and organisations to become empowered food citizens.

“We work with local and state governments to say we need to consciously shape our food and farming system and not just leave the dominant actors – the supermarkets in particular – to make all these decisions. They are making them with obvious interests at stake, responding to their shareholders. Those interests don’t correspond to the health and welfare of Australians, nor to the long-term sustainability of the Australian country … That’s what food sovereignty is all about. It’s about feeding people well and caring for the country.”

And why is that so important? Because food and diet is at the heart of good health, for a start. “The biggest burden on population health is diet now; it’s overtaken tobacco and alcohol as the biggest risk factor for chronic disease and early death. That’s a really, really big challenge,” says Dr Rose.

Food sovereignty is also critical in the fight against food poverty and ensuring future food security.

“The issues facing farmers have been decades in the making. We talk about farmers being price takers instead of price makers, which means that in the mainstream Australian food system, it’s the supermarkets that hold most of the power in terms of price setting and contractual arrangements.”

It’s a problem for the country in terms of food security because if all the farmers are getting older and all the young people aren’t farming, who’s going to grow our food in the future?”

And then, of course, there is climate change, which is making farming less viable and accelerating unsustainable forms of land management.

“These are really big, entrenched problems in the way that we relate to the country and manage the land. There’s a really big shift that has to happen, not just with Australian farmers but with the whole country. We need to understand this continent in a more profound way and engage in a process of dialogue and truth-telling with our First Nations peoples and understand what it is to live here and live here sustainably. Managing the land and caring for country and creating habitat for all the diverse creatures that make our life possible. Agriculture is such a big driver of land use change in Australia so this really comes back to the food system.”

But while the challenges are big, they are not insurmountable, says Dr Rose. And there is every reason to feel hopeful and optimistic about the future.

“The work I have been involved in over the past decade, I have seen a lot of things change. A lot more people have been involved – at a policy level, a lot of local governments are now getting involved. COVID was a bit of a wake-up call for a lot of people; a moment of rupture which is going to push things forward positively.”

It may be the case that the darkest hour is before the dawn. There are plenty of reasons to feel depressed and pessimistic but I choose to believe there is a lot of energy and momentum for change. The future is unwritten, it’s up to us to write it.”

Corporate control of food, Supermarket Duopoly

Trying to tackle abuses of market power with social media

#TellUsWhy

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 26th October, 2013

On Wednesday this week, the Victorian Farmers Federation launched a social media campaign with the hashtag, #TellUsWhy.

The targets of the campaign are Coles, Woolworths and Aldi, and the aim is to mobilise shoppers’ collective power, via Facebook and twitter, to pressure these mega-supermarkets to use Australian-grown produce in their homebrand product lines.

“We’re asking consumers – next time you’re in [one of those supermarkets] – check the fine print on the food you’re about to buy. If it’s an import take an image on your phone, then send it with the #telluswhyColes or #telluswhyAldi hashtag and your comments to the VFF – as a tweet to @VicFarmers or post it on the VFF’s Facebook page”, said VFF social media guru Tom Whitty, in the press release.

There’s a growing public awareness of the impact that cheap imported fruit (fresh and processed) is having on our growers and food manufacturers. Also this week the CEO of SPC Ardmona, Peter Kelly, issued an urgent plea to the new Coalition government for $25 million in funding, saying that without the money the company will be forced to close its Shepparton plant. The consequences of such a decision would be grim: 1000 workers redundant, the contracts of hundreds of local growers terminated, thousands of hectares of fruit trees ripped out ‘and a regional economy would be destroyed’, in the words of local Liberal MP Sharman Stone.

So the VFF is to be commended for its campaign, and apparently the building pressure has already had some impact, with Woolworths ‘committing to using Australian-grown frozen vegetables in its Select brand, and replacing $9 mn of imported tinned fruit with Goulburn Valley growers’ fruit”, according to VFF president Peter Tuohey.

Gary Gardiner
Gary Gardiner

But there are deeper dynamics at work which are placing inexorable downwards pressure on Australian growers and food manufacturers. One is the free trade agenda, which as I wrote last time is being ramped up several notches with the Trans Pacific Partnership deal.

And the other is the familiar story: the excessive market power of the big Australian supermarkets and the impacts of that power on farmers, workers and communities. The VFF campaign might persuade the supermarkets to buy more Australian produce, but what price will the growers and suppliers be getting?

This brings me back to Gary Gardiner, fourth-generation local farmer and now proprietor of Paradise Fruits in Sawtell, whom I first wrote about last month. With his intimate knowledge of the wholesale market system in Australia, Gary explained to me exactly how the supermarkets use their buying power to maximise their gains at the expense of growers:

“Coles and Woolies don’t just control 80% of the grocery market, they control the the market system as well. They’ll walk into a wholesale market and they basically control what’s going on. Let’s look at bananas in the Sydney market. There’s probably four main wholesale agents. With potatoes, there’s maybe two-three. So Coles and Woolies come in, they look at a product and say, right-o, that’s selling for $15 a carton. So they say to the agent, we’ll take all your production for $12, everything in your coolroom.”

“So that’s fine, they get a $3 discount. The agent’s going to say yes, because he’s on a fixed percentage. There’s no impact on him, it’s an easy sale. It’s the poor old grower who cops the hit”, Gary said.

“We’ve had so many stories. Let’s say there was a shortage of butternut pumpkin on the market. Let’s say it’s $1 a kilo. The [duopoly] will go in there and offer 70 cents a kilo, and take everything on the market. There’s usually one or two smaller growers there, holding out, and the price will automatically go to $1.50 a kilo, because there’s nothing on the market for anyone else to buy. Mysteriously, a percentage of the Coles and Woolies product will reappear for $1.50. Without even leaving the market, so they make a 100% mark-up on that product.”

Tell us Why? Indeed. To be continued.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Fair Food Week, Farmers Markets, Local and regional food economies, New market mechanisms, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

Crowd-funding for farming

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 28th September, 2013

It’s been said many times: there is a crisis of profitability in Australian agriculture. Many factors are involved, including drought, the high Australian dollar, softening commodity prices, and the market power of the duopoly.

In May this year the Australian Financial Review reported that ‘at least 80 farming operations worth more than $1mn across Australia are in receivership or some form of financial distress.’

Debt levels feature prominently in this picture. According the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Research Economics and Science (ABARES), total farm debt for broad-acre farms averaged $476,000 as at 30 June, 2013. For dairy farms, average farm debt was $701,500. Debt levels in the Queensland beef industry have increased 500% in under 20 years, with most of the increase coming in the post-GFC period.

Commenting on the AFR report, financial blogger Steven Johnson of Intelligent Investor wrote,

“Any Australian farm funded with more than 50% debt is a Ponzi operation. There are thousands of them.”

Low interest rates bring some relief, and have been welcomed by the NFF. Before it left office, the ALP introduced a two-year Farm Finance package worth $420 mn of concessional loans (interest-only payments for 5 years, before reverting to market rates). But in the absence of a genuinely ‘farmer-friendly’ national food policy (which would likely include substantial tax breaks), this package, which is also supported by the incoming administration, may simply be deferring the inevitable.

At the other end of the scale, smaller scale farmers selling into niche local markets are successfully exploring a different financing alternative: crowd-funding. With its origins dating famously to Joseph Pulitzer’s 1884 campaign that raised $100,000 from 125,000 people to complete the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, crowd-funding has really taken off alongside the rise of the social network era of the internet. US platforms such as IndieGoGo, GiveForward and KickStarter have helped artists, musicians and others raise tens of millions of dollars, mostly in small donations from large numbers of individuals, to enable them to make music videos, write books, fund travel and a host of other projects. Pledges are made securely via encypted software (using a credit or debit card), as you would do if you were purchasing a book on Amazon.com, and typically are only redeemed if the campaign reaches 100% of its target figure within the alloted time frame.

In Australia, the Pozible website (www.pozible.com) was launched in May 2010, and by August 2013 had raised $13 mn for more than 4000 projects. These have included in the past few months: $12,000 to send 5 Australian farmers to the Via Campesina global conference in Jakarta (June 2013), $27,570 to finance an on-farm butchery at the free range heritage pig farm, Jonai Farms in Daylesford, Victoria (June 2013), and $29,250 to finance the making of Just Food, an Australian-first Fair Food documentary (August-September 2013).

In the Coffs region, the owners of Nana Glen Synchronicity Farm, Josh and Tomoko Allen, recently launched a pozible campaign, seeking to raise $30,000 to finance a ‘gourmet food hub’ based on their property. As well as creating a farm-gate store which will be an additional market outlet for local producers, they intend to build a community facility for educational workshops on organic farming, permaculture, aquaculture, shitake mushroom farming and a venue for long table farm lunches to support access to good food for community members on low incomes.

Synchronicity Farm Stall, Coffs Harbour Harbourside Market
Synchronicity Farm Stall, Coffs Harbour Harbourside Market

Josh and Tomoko sell their heirloom fruit and veg at the Sunday Harbourside Market and the Nana Glen general store. Their campaign has around one month to run.

The project is in its early days, but it would make an important addition to food retailing diversity for this region. The food hub sector in the US is booming, with over 100 now in existence. It’s also starting in Australia, with projects in Casey, Trentham, Shepparton and Kyabram, amongst others. For more information, visit www.foodhubs.org.au.

Coffs Coast, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Fruit growing, Local and regional food economies, Retailers, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

A long road to Paradise


In August last year Master Grocers Australia (MGA), a national employer organisation which represents independent grocery supermarkets and liquor retailers in Australia, released its ‘Let’s Have Fair Competition!’ report, calling for regulatory reform to redress alleged abuse of market power and anti-competitive practices that MGA claimed Australia’s supermarket duopoly – Coles and Woolworths – were engaging in.

The Executive Summary of that August 2012 report claims that the duopoly, through tactics such as ‘price discrimination, shopper docket schemes, store saturation and over-sized store strategies [building huge supermarkets in small local markets in order to drive out existing competition and prevent new market entrants]’, is ‘crowding out all competition [and] rapidly reducing the choices in shopping format, brands, locally-derived products and service levels’.

Faced with inaction on the part of policymakers, the MGA released in August this year a follow-up report, ‘Finding a Solution’, which makes a number of specific proposals for reforms to the Competition and Consumer Act to achieve the MGA’s goal of a fairer grocery retail market in Australia.

These are issues that Gary Gardiner, co-proprietor of Paradise Fruits, a small fruit, veg and grocery shop in Sawtell, is all too familiar with.

DSC_0127

 

Gary’s family has been living and farming on small acreages in the Boambee / Coffs Harbour region since about 1890, first in middle Boambee, then to Stadium Drive, and finally on Sawtell Road.

“The original farm was developed as a diverse farm, with dairy and small cropping. In the early 1900s my family did a run to Bellingen and Nambucca to supply the local shops and markets”, Gary told me.

A century ago, family farming on a small property in this region offered a viable livelihood.

“In the older days, 10 acres was about what one family could manage on their own. Any bigger than that, you needed multiple families and / or outside workers”, Gary said.

“Most farmers grew a commercial crop – usually bananas – supplemented with other, smaller, cash crops, like tomatoes, cucumbers or zucchinis. The income from the smaller crops was what they lived on, and what they produced commercially just about covered the costs of running the farm itself”, Gary said.

There was also a strong ethic of self-sufficiency. “Back in those days, most of the food the family ate was produced on the farm as well. That was certainly true during the Depression era – and even we still did that up to the 1970s”, Gary added.

Gary Gardiner
Gary Gardiner

As the food supply chain in Australia became steadily more centralised over the decades, the viability of the small-scale, diversified family farming model was increasingly threatened, as Gary explained:

“About 24 years ago, we were still growing bananas and small crops, and around that time we set up ripening rooms so we could supply the two Coffs Harbour independent supermarkets, Cox’s, and Tucker Bag. But they could only take 10% of our production. But the profit we got from that 10% equalled the returns we got from the other 90% going through the mainstream marketing system.”

“That’s how much we were all getting ripped off”, Gary remembers. “So we [aimed to] take out the middle men. And when you do that, you have a chance of actually making a living [as a grower].”

“It’s basically the difference between being a price-maker and a price-taker. If you were selling to the [central] markets, new cartons had to be used, so you had to buy those – $1.50 each. Freight – $1 per carton to get the product to market. Agent’s commission – $3 a carton back then. We were only getting $10 a carton.”

“And during the summer, when there was a glut, we got nothing back at all. You’d be doing all of that work, carrying all those costs, and you’d actually be paying to send your product to market, and you’d get nothing for it.”

Cox’s and Tucker Bag closed their doors not long after Woolworths opened, in the late 1980s. We’ll hear Gary’s thoughts on the impacts of the supermarket duopoly next time.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Fair Food Week, Food policy, Local and regional food economies, Supermarket Duopoly

Fair Food Week arrives in Australia

Australia’s first Fair Food Week

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 17th August, 2013

On the 1st August this year I attended Australia’s first Symposium on Supermarket Power. Jointly organised by the law schools of Monash and Melbourne University, the aim of this event was to explore the extent of supermarket power in Australia’s economy and society, the impacts of that power, and what if anything could be done about it.

It was a fascinating event in many ways. We heard from a financial analyst documenting the extraordinary sales growth and profit performance of Woolworths and Coles over the past decade, along with some cautionary words expecting both indicators to moderate somewhat in the current decade because of the entry of Aldi and CostCo into the Australian market.

We heard about the new supermarket adjudicator appointed under the UK’s mandatory supermarket code of conduct, and how she intended to exercise her powers, including by the imposition of ‘punitive fines’ based on a percentage of turnover in the event of repeated abuses of market power down the supply chain by the supermarket majors.

Tasmanian senator Peter Whish-Wilson announced that the Greens want to extend divestiture powers to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and to impose an immediate moratorium on the opening of any new stores by the duopoly. We also heard from Robert Hadler, General Manager of Corporate Affairs at Coles, who welcomed the discussion and acknowledged that Coles (and, by implication, Woolworths) needed to do more to justify their ‘social license’ to operate.

I was invited to attend to speak about the challenges facing our food system and the emerging ‘fair food’ movement. I had the audience smiling when I put up a slide with that ubiquitous social media question, ‘WTF?’

WTF image

‘What does he mean?’, I’m sure they wondered. Then I showed the short film, Orange Tree Blues, which tells the moving story of Riverina citrus grower Mick Audinno finding himself forced to rip out hectares of healthy orange trees because he had lost his markets as a result of cheaper imported juice concentrate.

And then my next slide revealed two new meanings of WTF:

This is a question, I told the audience, that every Australian should be asking themselves. Because we are losing farmers at a truly alarming rate – an average of 76 per week from 2006-2011, expected to rise to 130 per week during the current decade.

A gentleman from the Victorian State government, himself a farmer, came up to me afterwards and told me I was being ‘mischievous’ with these figures (which, by the way, come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and KPMG). His point being that it doesn’t matter if we lose eight ‘inefficient’ farmers, if we can replace them with one who is much more ‘productive’ and ‘efficient’.

WTF image 2

But this rather misses the point. In our singular and relentless focus on productivity and efficiencies, we lose sight of so much else, the value of which cannot be simplistically reduced to monetary calculations. This is what scholar John McMmurtry terms ‘the life-blind structure of the neoclassical paradigm’: the exclusion as a matter of definition of considerations such as human health and well-being, and eco-system integrity, that are actually fundamental to our continued survival as a species, let alone our civilisation in its current form.

In an effort to foreground a national conversation on food and agriculture that begins from the question, ‘What values do we as Australians want to underlie our food system?’, the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is facilitating the country’s first-ever Fair Food Week, from 19-25 August.

ffw-2013-logo

 

What we call ‘fair food’ is food that is produced in ways that are fair to all and that guarantee economic and nutritional health to everyone in Australia’s food value chain – Australian farmers, Australian food processors, small to medium size food retailers and we who eat the products of these producers and enterprises.

 

Already over 90 events have been organised around the country, including forums, workshops, film screenings, farm dinners, garden tours food swaps and much more. We have been humbled by the response Fair Food Week has received. It speaks to the emergence of a fair food movement in Australia that is rapidly growing in confidence and capacity.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Farmers Markets, Food policy, Local and regional food economies, National Food Plan, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

Local Food, Local Farms

Local food and the 2013 Federal Election

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 3rd August, 2013

As the 2013 Federal election draws closer, policy announcements are starting to come thick and fast.

The Government has already set out its stall on food and agriculture, in the shape of the National Food Plan. The ‘big idea’ is that Australia will become the ‘food bowl’ of Asia, with a 45% increase in exports and a 30% in agricultural productivity by 2025.

The Coalition likewise wants a big increase in exports and foresees a ‘dining boom’ to replace the ‘mining boom’. The distinguishing feature from the Government’s plan is the emphasis on Northern Australia, with the damming of rivers and the clearing of land seen as the key to opening up the untapped resources of the northern frontier.

Meanwhile Bob Katter’s Australia Party has taken an entirely different tack, focusing on what he sees as the largely negative role played by Australia’s supermarket duopoly in terms of the viability of our farmers. He has accordingly introduced a Bill to Reduce Supermarket Dominance, which among other things makes it an offence, punishable by a $50 million fine, for any supermarket operator to retain a market share greater than 20% withinsix years after the passage of the legislation.

That $50 million fine contrasts with the $61,200 fine imposed on Coles after it was found to have engaged in misleading conduct, by selling as ‘baked today, sold today’ bread that had actually been made weeks ago in Ireland.

Katter’s initiative, which was supported by Nick Xenophon, has been branded by the industry as ‘radical’ and ‘extreme’. Forcibly breaking up companies is indeed radical, although there are plenty of historical precedents for such actions. I can’t speak for Bob Katter, but I imagine he might say that a situation in which two companies control in excess of 70% of the grocery market is itself ‘radical and extreme’.

On this issue, the Government and the Coalition effectively adopt a ‘do nothing’ approach. The Greens, on the other hand, propose that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission be given divestiture powers, although they propose nothing as directly forthright as Katter.

Local Food Local Farms
Local Food Local Farms

What the Greens have announced in the past week is the establishment of an $85 million grants program to support various forms of direct marketing of produce by farmers and growers, including farmers’ markets, regional food hubs, and community-supported agriculture vegie-box schemes.

This proposal draws directly on the experience of the ‘Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food’ program operated for some years by the US Department of Agriculture. Partly as a result of such initiatives, the numbers of farmers’ markets in the US have more than doubled in the past decade, from 2900 in 2001 to 7000 in 2010. And the numbers of farms selling some or all of their produce through local markets rose to 136,000 in 2012, a 24% increase from 2012.

The $85 million in grants for direct marketing compares favourably with the $1.5 million grudgingly offered by the Government in the National Food Plan to support community food initiatives such as farmers’ markets and community gardens. That $1.5 million came with many strings attached, including a dollar-for-dollar matched funding requirement. I know of many groups that would have liked to apply but were put off by such conditions.

Many people in rural and regional Australia will be sceptical that the Greens are or ever could be the friends of farmers. That said, direct marketing and local food is growing at 5% -10% per annum in North America, with solid and bi-partisan political support at both state and federal levels, and with clear benefits to farmers. Indeed, net farmer numbers in the US recently increased for the first time in decades, with many new entrants being considerably younger than the average age of 58. Clearly something is going on here.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Supermarket Duopoly

Two supermarkets, no farmers

A country with two supermarkets, but no farmers

A version of this article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 9th March 2013.

In my last column I quoted ‘Farmer Bluey’, who runs a mixed farm producing not insignificant quantities of wool, wheat, oats and lamb. He is joining ‘all his friends’ and abandonding farming this year.

This week I’m going to introduce you to Oxley Island dairy farmer Jane Burney (now Jane Polson), who has a herd of 300 Stud Holsteins. Last July Jane became so outraged at the consequences to her industry of the $1 a litre milk price war between the supermarkets, that she fired off an angry post to the Facebook page of Coles. Here’s part of what it says:

The consumer is paying $1 a litre and the only winner here is the supermarket…Obviously it is cheaper to buy [produce] from overseas than from our country, grown in God knows what…Your latest ad campaign sprouting that you support Aussie growers is insulting…Eventually all the growers you so-called support will be out of business…The consumer will be stuck buying expensive, overseas produce…I am ashamed to watch your ads and us farmers burn in resentment when we do.

Now if you’re not a farmer, you may think Jane is exaggerating. But a couple of months ago the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released a Social Trends report on ‘Australian farming and farmers.’ Part of what it discusses are the changing demographics of farmers, as seen in this chart:

While the average age of the Australian farmer is now 53 (or 56, depending on which report you read), nearly a quarter of all farmers are over 65, compared to only 3% of the total workforce. We have thousands of farmers who are working past 75, and even past 85. Whatever happened to the principle of a dignified retirement and enjoyment of leisure at the end of a long working life?

The percentage of working farmers over 55 has risen from 26% of the total in 1981, to 47% in 2011. Just as worrying, the proportion of farmers under 35 has more than halved, from 28% of the total in 1981 to just 13% today.

My brother, a Federal public servant, retired  a couple of years ago at 55, and is now a man of nearly total leisure. I know he worked hard (though he wasn’t averse to the odd long Friday lunch!) – but was his work so much more valuable and important that he’s entitled to a relaxed and secure middle and old age, while such a prospect for many of our farmers, if it comes at all, will only be through a payout from a developer or mining company? Which of course raises a whole host of other questions about long term food security.

Farming generally has become so devalued that rates of suicide amongst farmers are nearly two and a half times the average for the workforce as a whole. Is it any wonder, then, that large numbers are joining Farmer Bluey and voting with their feet? In fact, according to a 2012 study carried out by accountants KPMG, no fewer than half of Australia’s farmers expect to leave farming in the next decade.

Meanwhile, delegates at this week’s ABARES ‘Future of Food and Farming’ conference were saying things like, ‘Australian agriculture has to become more globally competitive – we can’t afford a $7 minimum wage.’ So it’s not enough that we treat our farmers like dirt, we must create near slave-like conditions for agricultural workers in order to reach those holy grails of ‘increased productivity’ and ‘greater global competitiveness’.

Oxley Island Dairy Farmer Jane Burney (from the Australian)

It’s no coincidence that all this is happening as Coles’ and Woolworths’ share of the grocery market has doubled since the mid-1970s. I’ll leave the last words to Jane Burney, who ends with a brilliant piece of modern-day bone-pointing:

 

There is a growing backlash against your behaviour. Your suppliers and the community (your customers) are on to you. This dissatisfaction will grow to the point where the milk supply will be removed from you and placed back in the hands of cooperatives made up of dairy farmers, community reps and government. This is as is should be, as you have shown yourselves to be lacking in the vision, integrity and commercial strategic thinking required to be entrusted with such an important role re: key parts of our food supply and economy. History will look back on your behaviour over the last 10 years and say this was when the major supermarkets over-extended themselves, dodged their community obligations and ultimately destroyed their brands and shareholder value…Down, down? The only thing going down long term will be the Coles brand and its share price.

Jane’s post, by the way, has so far been ‘liked’ close to 77,000 times and generated nearly 5000 comments.

You can read the original post here: https://www.facebook.com/coles/posts/391593540904667

And here is the extended version: http://www.holsteinworld.com/story.php?id=6897

advocate, Corporate control of food, Food policy, Supermarket Duopoly

Cheap food = A country without farmers

Sugar, Rice and supermarket power

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 23rd February, 2013.

A big fortnight for food news.

We saw the release of new national dietary guidelines, which basically reaffirmed good, solid, grandma’s advice: eat a variety of healthy foods, above all your five veg and two fruits, go easy on sugary and fatty foods, and keep physically active.

The major change was the official recommendation, for the first time, that Australians ‘limit’ our intake of sugar, especially in soft drinks. Despite the Guidelines Working Committee basing their recommendations on no fewer than 55,000 pieces of peer-reviewed evidence, the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC), which represents the likes of Coca Cola Amatil, weren’t happy at all about the advice to limit sugar intake. ‘The jury is still out’ on whether added sugar is part of a healthy diet, according  to them.

This reminds me of how the tobacco companies used to say ‘the jury was still out’ on whether there was a link between smoking and lung cancer, in order to resist and delay health warnings on cigarette packages.

Meanwhile, the burden of obesity on our public health system is getting ever larger. In the UK, which faces exactly the same issue, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has put out a demand for a 20% tax on fizzy drinks, a strict limit on fast food outlets near schools and other places where children and youth gather, the removal of junk food vending machines from hospitals, and a prohibition on junk food ads before 9.00 p.m.

I can just see the AFGC spokesperons going purple in the face if anything similar was ever proposed in Australia. Which it will be, as we get sicker and sicker, and finally realise why.

Then there was exciting news from India’s poorest state, Bihar (pop 100 million, and 50% of families in poverty), where the application of what’s called the System of Rice / Root Intensification (SRI) has ‘dramatically increased yields with wheat, potatoes, sugar cane, yams, tomatoes, garlic, aubergine and many other crops’, according to the Guardian newspaper. World-record rice yields of 22.4 tonnes per hectare have been achieved – with no GMOs, and no herbicides.

A fact sheet from Sunrice boasts that ‘Australian rice yields of 10 tonnes per hectare are the highest I the world’. Not any more they aren’t!

In the case of rice, SRI means planting out fewer, and younger, seedlings, in drier soil, and with regular weeding to aerate the roots. An advocate of SRI, professor Norman Uphoff of Cornell University, says that the agricultural shift of the 21st century has to involve moving away from the obsession with genetics and using chemical fertilisers, to better crop management practices: ‘We have tried to make agriculture an industrial enterprise and have forgotten its biological roots.”

Meanwhile, new reports in the United States showed that two million acres of native grasslands have been converted to corn and soy monocultures in the past five years alone, driven in part by government subsidies and targets for the ethanol industry.

Finally came the news that Australia’s competition watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), will investigate Coles and Woolworths for alleged ‘unconscionable conduct’ in the form of bullying tactics against food and grocery suppliers over prices and supply contracts.

We’ve been here before, in 2008. Professor Christine Parker, an expert in competition law from Monash University, says that this current investigation ‘only treats the symptoms and diverts attention away from the real cause of the problem: supermarket power’; and that because of the way the legal provisions are worded, it will be very hard for the ACCC to win any case against the supermarkets.

Coles Farmer Pain

In her view, the ‘tragedy of the Coles-Woolworths duopoly is the narrow, greedy, profit-oriented way in which they control and manipulate the relationship between all of us who eat food and those who produce it…Squeezing producers on prices is supposedly part of [the equation of delivering cheap food to consumers.’

In a piece on the ABC Drum site (18 February), farmer Sophie Love urged consumers to send a signal to the supermarkets and push for fair milk prices. She was met with a torrent of anti-farmer sentiment. But then there was farmer ‘Bluey’, who had this to say:

“Let’s look at a mixed farm. Last year I produced 5000kg of fine wool, 600t of good protein wheat, 80t of quality oats and 8000kg of lamb. Income was $183,000. Costs (fuel, fertiliser, freight, rams, shearing, rates, parts, tax, electricity, labour, interest, etc) $175,000.

We’re already broke and it isn’t even the end of February. We’re getting out this year, all our friends have already left. We can’t compete with mining wages, we can’t (and wouldn’t) strike and nobody gives a stuff.”

At the end of the day the real cost of cheap food will be a country without farmers. Is that what we really want?

advocate, Collaborative cultures and networks, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, National Food Plan, Resilience, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly, Urban agriculture

An Australia Day resolution

An Australia Day resolution

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 24th January, 2013

The traditional and conventional thing is to make resolutions on New Year’s Day, or shortly thereafter.

That makes perfect sense. Start the year off on a positive note, turn over a new leaf, and all that.

But resolutions can be made at any time. So why not make an Australia Day resolution? Something that each of us decides that we can do to help make this country a better place to live in, and leave it a better place for our kids.

My resolution is to keep working, in the ways that I can, for a fairer and more sustainable food and farming system for our region, and our country. So that our soils are regenerated, rather than degraded. So that our water tables are replenished, rather than depleted and polluted. So that our cities are full of food growing and producing areas, in schools, in childcare and aged care centres, in streets, parks, vacant lots and rooftops. In backyards, frontyards, and community gardens. So that everyone, no matter who they are or how much money they have in their pocket or bank account, can enjoy healthy, nourishing food, every day.

So that our farmers get a fairer deal, and are not up to their necks in debt. So that five Australian farmers don’t continue to leave the land every day. And so that our children will want to embrace farming and food production, and caring for the land, as a fufilling and dignified life choice.

Because what we have forgotten, in our modern, information age and consumer economy, is that any civilization, anywhere, is ultimately founded on agriculture. If we don’t get the food production right, if we don’t look after the land, the water and the men and women who do the work of producing the food, then we may as well forget about all the rest.

I think these resolutions chime with the sentiments of a great many Australians. In fact, I know they do, because last September, in my role as national co-ordinator of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, I was approached by the Australia Institute to include some questions in their regular national attitudes and behaviours survey.

These surveys go out to around 1,400 Australians, being a representative cross-section of men and women, city and country dwellers, different political affiliations, age groupings and so on.

We asked three questions in the October 2012 survey. The first was, ‘What top two measures should Australia adopt to ensure that sufficient quantitites of fresh, healthy and affordable foods are available to all?’, 86% nominated ‘Support local farmers to produce more’, and 63% nominated ‘Protect our best farmland from different uses, e.g. mining / housing’. 25% said ‘support people to grow more of their own food’, and a mere 5% nominated ‘import more of our basic food requirements’ as one of their top two choices.

The second question was, ‘How important is it to you that Australian family farmers and small-to-medium sized food businesses are economically viable?’. 62% said ‘very important’, and 30% said ‘quite important’. 2.3% said ‘not very important’ and a tiny 0.4% said ‘not important at all.’

Finally, when asked ‘What do you think should be the main two goals of Australia’s food system?’, a whopping 85% nominated ‘Promote and support regional / local food production and access to locally produced food’. 43.5% nominated ‘Achieve a globally competitive food industry and new export markets’, and 35.6% said ‘Ensure ecosystem integrity’.

Should any government or political party choose to take notice, these figures speak to a massive national consensus in favour of policies and public investment in regional and local food economies, and for support for our local farmers and food producers. Such policies enjoy twice the level of support of the goal of building ‘a globally competitive food industry and new export markets’.

Can you guess which is the primary objective of the Federal Government’s National Food Plan, due out shortly?