A FEW years back a US farmer named Joel Salatin wrote a book titled Everything I want to do is illegal.
Salatin is widely regarded as one of the most efficient and profitable producers of vast amounts of high quality food from small holdings, and faces many regulatory dilemmas making it tough for any Aussie farmer to think outside the square.
How lucky, then, are Chinese farmers who have zero safety standards, seemingly no health guidelines, far fewer that we let them dump crappy, unsafe and potentially contaminated food into our country so corporates like Coles and Woolies can make ever greater shareholder profits.
Our growers face huge regulatory hoops to be allowed to export their produce, so if our allegedly amazing free trade agreements mean it’s impossible for the government to make importing companies play by the same rules, maybe we need to hand our trade negotiators to the Indonesian authorities to be punished, rip up the agreements, and draw up new rules which mean cheapskate companies have the same overheads as our blokes.
Here’s another thing that’s illegal – our farmers cannot grow industrial hemp (iHemp) and sell it for human consumption, in fact Australia and New Zealand are the only two countries where you can’t eat it.
Yet iHemp is regarded by many as the healthiest and most nutritious food on the planet.
Worse still, this crazy ban means farmers desperate to cash in on a lucrative iHemp food market don’t have that opportunity.
Yet these same authorities banning iHemp are quite happy to allow 95 per cent of imported foodstuffs into the country with absolutely no inspection process.
"Yet iHemp is regarded by many as the healthiest and most nutritious food on the planet."
What the ?
Monty Python, Yes Minister and Utopia wouldn’t dare script a bureaucratic comedy around a farce like this, it would be deemed too incredible to be true.
Just to be sure everyone understands what’s happening here - we allow importers to dump garbage onto cheapskate supermarket shelves thanks to the power of the corporate lobby, which influences both sides of politics, yet make our primary producer go to great expense to ensure the low-margin food they produce is safe for consumers in other countries – talk about foreign aid gone mad.
If people from another planet were looking at our decision making processes they would shake their two heads in amazement that we could be so stupid.
We’re having endless debate, arguments (and on-going) costs over whether we can not only eat something good for cancer, depression and being zero GI, when by freeing up this industry we could actually deliver on the federal government’s stated agenda of getting better farm gate returns by spawning whole new markets.
"Dangers from cheap and unregulated imported food hasn’t been a sexy issue the mainstream media has been interested in – until now."
Emerald farmer Paul Murphy, one of Australia’s largest organic growers, says that every single thing he exports has to be minutely inspected and if there’s a weevil in it, he has to rectify the problem, ‘Yet we let anything in’, Mr Murphy said.
‘It’s common sense to expect the same standards to be applied to all food products entering Australia.
‘The problem is, common sense isn’t all that common these days’.
Set up a ‘Common Sense Party’ and people will vote for it – maybe that’s what Australia needs at all levels of government to sort out the problems facing regional Australia.
There are so many simple, relatively cheap and enormously cost-effective things we can do to get agriculture profitable and our country towns back on track, yet we have alleged farm leaders and country politicians locked up in endless meetings with corporate lobbyists, banks and empire building farmer organisations who are far more interested in talk than making positive things happen right now.
Dangers from cheap and unregulated imported food hasn’t been a sexy issue the mainstream media has been interested in – until now.
All of a sudden a few people get sick eating garbage berries from China and it’s the story of the week across all media platforms – it’s just a shame no one really cared until a headline crisis developed.
Basically we’re doing everything wrong and it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
If we were doing everything right, or even just took advantage of a percentage of the huge opportunities out there, regional Australia would turn around along with the health of our urban population because farmers would be able to supply all the healthy and nutritious food the country needs.
At the moment not only don’t we have tariffs on imports, the extra expense we put our producers to by law are essentially a tariff in reverse – how the Chinese and other governments must chortle at our expense.
Put up a Facebook page praising our government’s efforts of trade liberalisation and it’d get 1.5 billion ‘likes’ within 24 hours.
It makes me sick, and I don’t eat cheap contaminated food dumped in our country, I buy meat from my neighbourhood butcher, Blue, and fruit from a local shop selling fresh domestic products.
I see the major supermarkets are now all public about toughening up food labelling laws but in the background the pressure not to change would be immense, because that impacts on the hallowed bottom line.
Really, how hard is it to have one label that states, clearly, that everything inside the packet was grown and processed in Australia – if you can’t guarantee that standard, you don’t get the label or the price premium and market share that standard would attract.
"iHemp has so many potential markets that the creation of a viable industry would kickstart all sorts of new jobs."
It’s sickening that personal interests or commercial profits are at the back of all these stupid decisions, like the iHemp scare campaign from cops Australia-wide.
Some senior police have tied their ongoing careers to the introduction of roadside drug swab testing and are lobbying hard to keep iHemp away from human consumption because a large scale industry would quickly expose the inherent inaccuracies in the drug swab process.
Many countries have discredited roadside drug swab testing because it returns far too many ‘false positives’ and at best is only an indicator that people may have taken some drugs in the past few weeks, not whether they are driving impaired at the time of the swabbing.
To think that a test which has no basis in credibility is continually put up as the reason for iHemp food consumption being prevented is a travesty and a slap in the face to farmers who need crops like this to return to profitability.
iHemp has so many potential markets that the creation of a viable industry would kickstart all sorts of new jobs.
For naysayers who believe industry should stand or fall on its commercial merits, the domestic cotton industry only got started because the NSW government backed the first gin near Narrabri, but after that helping hand the industry has done the rest by itself.