Government sabotages family farmers,
food security in AWB extortion
Wheat Exports Australia’s decision to deny the independent wheat grower-controlled AWB Ltd. a wheat export license amounts to government extortion to force family farmers to hand control of the nation’s wheat industry over to multinational food cartels.
The timing of WEA’s decision is calculated to force reluctant family farmers to accede to the demands of bankers, and vote in favour of scrapping AWB’s two-tier share structure, which keeps control of the company with growers.
Although AWB was stripped of its single desk export monopoly in June, which it had used for 67 years to guarantee Australia’s wheat growers the best possible deal in the international market, up to 80 percent of the growers have mounted a rear-guard resistance by sticking with AWB, in the hope of using its relative size to win favourable terms in a world trade dominated by cartels like Cargill, Bunge and Glencore International.
AWB’s two-tier share structure was the growers’ guarantee when the Australian Wheat Board was privatised by the John Howard/John Anderson Liberal/National Coalition Government in 1998, under orders from Bankers Trust.
Independent wheat growers have repeatedly voted to keep the share structure; during the latest vote on 21st August, when it became evident that despite the enormous pressure growers had again voted no, the ballot was adjourned until 3rd September.
Then, on 26th August, WEA, which is run out of Agriculture Minister Tony Burke’s office, pointedly excluded AWB Ltd. when it announced the first five export licenses, but included the giant multinational Cargill, which has been preying on AWB’s business for years.
WEA’s intervention amounts to blackmail, designed to push family farmers into the clutches of the very cartels the wheat board was originally established to protect them from.
What is at stake here is the survival of literally thousands of family farmers, our national food security, and the world food supply at a time of a dire world food shortage.
A nation’s food security depends on a flourishing agricultural sector made up of independent family farms; before the establishment of the Australian Wheat Board in 1939, wheat growers eked out a subsistence living, and quite often didn’t survive—it was the AWB that established wheat growing as a viable industry in Australia, which eventually expanded to account for 15 percent of the world export market.
Now the Rudd Government, continuing the Howard Government’s policies, is blatantly prying the control of the Australian wheat industry off our family farmers, and handing it over to Cargill and the financiers.
The CEC calls on all Australians to join the fight to save our family farms, our industries, and our national economy, against the major parties’ insistence on British free trade policies which are reducing our nation to a colonial economy—a territorial possession to be looted for its raw materials.
To join the CEC, click here.
For a free copy of 1932, the DVD which exposes the British creation of free trade as a means of extending their Empire, click here.
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