Climate botherer Tim ‘It’ll Never Rain Again’ Flannery does occasionally say something insightful. And invariably immediate flagellates himself when his fellow lefties notice. Take, for instance, his inconvenient noticing, in The Future Eaters, that the Māori had wound up in such a dead-end, once they isolated themselves on New Zealand, that they were being reduced to cannibalism as a survival strategy. The arrival of the British, Flannery argued, essentially saved the Māori from extinction.
You can imagine how that went down.
In the same book, Flannery also argued that a strategically wise future direction for Australia would be to concentrate on being a low-population, high-agricultural yield food basket for the region. Not only would this make it more difficult for an aggressor (given that their neighbours would be askance at seeing their grocery store get taken over), the income could be invested in 21st-century warfare technology that relies on robots rather than boots.
For once, Flannery was onto something. Naturally, the elite class went the complete opposite direction.
After more than two centuries of living off “golden soil and wealth for toil”, feeding itself and millions of people overseas, Australia is facing an agricultural Armageddon that is fast approaching.
For so long, as Australian farmers have fed and clothed the nation, there has been so much abundance, allowing for seemingly ever-increasing exports of excess food and fibre, with always rising value, that along with mining have formed the foundation of the economy. Such bounty has given rise to the boast that we feed 80 million people.
The problem is brutally simple: the value of farm production has more than doubled since 2000, yet the actual volume of food and fibre has risen only 30 per cent. In the same period the population grew by 50 per cent. Do the maths.
Population growth, agricultural water shortages and the alienation of arable land have combined to raise the spectre that Australia could become a net importer in some areas of basic foods during next decade.
The projections are sobering. By 2040 Australia could face domestic shortfalls of 47 per cent for pork, 40 per cent for butter, 21 per cent for eggs, 16 per cent for apples and similar gaps across chicken, rice and cheese. Some estimates suggest we could become a net importer of food and fibre as early as 2037. For a country that once boasted it fed 80 million people, the idea is almost sacrilegious. It is also the predictable outcome of deliberate policy.
Water that once grew food has been funnelled into environmental flows. Farmers have been pressured to sell water back to governments or to foreign investors. Productive farmland has been locked up for carbon sequestration and renewable energy projects. Fertilisers and fuel costs have soared under the net-zero regime. Dams have not been built. New production areas have not been opened. In the Murray-Darling Basin, the nation’s food bowl, the Water Act 2007 and its Basin Plan have imposed permanent caps that treat agriculture as the residual claimant after the environment has taken its ever-expanding share.
Nationals senator Matt Canavan is one of the few still prepared to state the obvious.
“Our nation is sleepwalking into a food security crisis. We are resting back on broad assurances of our net food position while under the surface large deficits are building up. We have become complacent and naive about the basic challenges of supplying food, energy and housing to millions of people” […]
Canavan says the decline in production is because we have stopped building dams and opening new areas of farm production. We have actively shut down production in our nation’s food bowl, the Murray-Darling, through water buybacks; more than 90 per cent of our carbon emission reductions have come from converting productive farmland to forest; and Labor’s net-zero agenda has pushed up costs and ended the local production of key farm inputs such as fertiliser.
“If longer-run trends continue, Australia could face domestic production shortfalls across many supermarket staples by the end of the next decade and, under this scenario, by 2040 imports could be needed to cover one in six apples, four in 10 blocks of butter and nearly half of pork consumption,” he says.
Canavan has plenty of reasons to be worried, not all of them a decade away. The revolt by the Nationals’ rural constituency has been brutal. Former leader David Littleproud lived up to his name by willingly signing up to the madness. He got ignominiously booted as the Nationals are slowly eroded to a minor party rump. Canavan is all too aware that his immediate political future is on the line.
In Queensland, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has steadily eroded the Nationals’ rural base. Barnaby Joyce crossed to One Nation. In the Riverina, Michael McCormack watches schools and production numbers shrink. In Farrer, once the seat of Tim Fischer and Sussan Ley, One Nation’s David Farley won the by-election campaigning on water. Further south in South Australia, One Nation now holds multiple state seats inside Liberal federal territory. The common thread is not immigration or culture-war slogans. It is the slow strangulation of the regions that still produce the food the cities take for granted.
City Australians notice only when supermarket prices rise. By then it’s too late. The same political class that diverted water, locked up land and imposed the costs of net zero will, of course, blame the farmers, the weather or global markets. Anything except the decisions they themselves made.
Flannery’s old advice – stay lean, grow food, sell it and buy the best defensive technology money can purchase – looks wiser by the year. So of course the elite class march steadily in the other direction to disaster.
