Labor and the Liberals joined forces in parliament last week to pass the bill to scrap the Australian Wheat Board’s single marketing desk, over the protests of 80 per cent of Australia’s wheat farmers.

(The AWB’s single desk pooled, marketed and shipped all of Australia’s export wheat, thereby getting the best possible average price for all growers; now, wheat growers are at the mercy of the multinational grain cartels.)

At a time when farmers are being slaughtered by the explosion in the costs of their biggest inputs like fuel, fertiliser and water (fertilisers that cost $400 per tonne in 2006 are now $1800 per tonne; water that was recently $40 per megalitre (ML) is now anywhere from $1000 to $5000 per ML), when their debt burden has grown to $48 billion, from $27 billion in 1998, and when farmers from one end of the country to the other fear that as many as 50 per cent of them could be forced off the land this year—this act will drive thousands of wheat growers out of business.

Worse, it comes at a time when 850 million people worldwide could starve to death, because of the global food shortage.

The Rudd government’s action in the face of this is tantamount to genocide.

The Government should watch itself, because by actions like this, Australia is becoming increasingly isolated.

We are now one of a handful of countries, including Britain and the Bush administration, which is sticking with a free trade agenda, whilst most other countries in the world are in revolt against British free trade.

Even the right wing President of France, Nikolas Sarkozy, is choosing the importance of food production, over free trade: “Every thirty seconds a child dies because it’s hungry,” Sarkozy said in Brussels on June 19, “and we would go and negotiate a 20 per cent reduction of the European agriculture production in the framework of the WTO? There is only one person in favour of this, and that is Mr Mandelson [British EU Trade Commissioner]. It is not the position of France.”

Australia won’t have a future as an industrial economy, unless we too dump our suicidal free trade fetish, and return to the protectionist measures which made us a great industrial nation, and which most of the rest of the world are once again embracing.

Click here to read the report, “British Empire Threshes Australian Wheat Board” from Executive Intelligence Review magazine.

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