by ROGER CROOK – AUSTRALIAN farmers and miners are battling to survive the Albanese Government’s obsession with a net-zero emissions target.
The value and strategic importance of agriculture and mining to Australia has been neglected by both sides of politics for too long.
- Australia is unable to defend itself and, increasingly, it cannot feed itself.
- Food imports have nearly doubled since 2003.
- Australian food processors have either closed down or relocated overseas.
The main game is all about receiving international praise from those loyal to green energy and the Paris Agreement.
For decades the decline of strategic stability and economic strength has been overlooked by all three tiers of government.
DEFEND
Ponder this; Australia is unable to defend itself and, increasingly, it cannot feed itself.
In 2022/23 Australia imported food worth about $28b; food exports were just under $70b, so, the net exports were just over $40b.
That $28b is probably double or $56b by the time it gets to the supermarket: Australian consumers spend more than a billion dollars a week on imported food and drink, the vast majority of which could and should be grown and processed in Australia.
Australia is an island, blessed with a climate that stretches from tropical to temperate.
The arteries through which our national blood flows are sea lanes across great oceans. If they close, we perish; it’s as simple as that.
Australia has the ability to be self-sufficient in food, yet it has become progressively reliant on others; from the other side of the world – months and oceans away.
Does Prime Minister Anthony Albanese or his Agriculture Minister, the uninspiring and agriculturally illiterate Senator Murray Watt (a Labor apparatchik rewarded for factional loyalty), realise that if the sea lanes close for just a month, shelves in our supermarkets would rapidly empty.
Why hasn’t National Party Leader David Littleproud, Shadow Minister for Agriculture; a proud country boy and advocate for the regions and the agricultural, horticultural and pastoral industries, brought this matter to the attention of Peter Dutton?
For decades, politicians in Australia have failed to appreciate that ignoring agriculture and the food processing industry has been a mistake of monumental proportions for which we will pay dearly.
If this challenge is not addressed; if hostilities break out in our region, and we are constantly told this could happen (think Taiwan); then Australia will be as vulnerable as Britain was in 1939.
On the outbreak of WWII Hitler blockaded the Atlantic in an attempt to starve the British into submission. If it had not been for the British Merchant Navy, America and the British Empire he would have succeeded.
EMPIRE
In 2025, Australia does not have a merchant navy and, most critically, does not have an America or an Empire ready and willing to quickly respond.
These days, international shipping avoids conflict zones due to the hight cost of insurance. Transits passing through the Suez Canal have decreased by 40 per cent due to the activities of Houthi rebels in the Red Sea.
Ships now traverse the Cape. This has increased sea freight cost from Europe to Australia by about 20 per cent.
The international weight of opinion is that we’re closer to another world conflict than at any time since the Cold War.
Australian has less than six weeks fuel in store; diesel, petrol and avgas. This includes ADF supplies.
A similar situation now applies to food; imported food on which we increasingly rely. It is a dire situation.
We are a trucking nation. When trucks run out of fuel, this nation stops.
The Coalition knew this when it was in power and, like Labor, did nothing about it.
Why are Australians unaware of the vulnerability of their food supply? The answer is propaganda!
We are convinced and comforted by the lie that Australia produces enough food to feed 75m people, three times our population.
Our population is about 27m. That’s an extra seven million since 2003 and our food imports have nearly doubled since then.
So where does this chest puffing propaganda come from?
Australian farmers are among the best in the world. They produce virtually every skerrick of fresh food we eat; all the fruit, vegetables and meat we consume is Australian and the best in the world.
That’s where it stops.
Australian food exports are what are called “unimproved”. That is, we produce and export millions of tonnes of grain, wheat, barley, oats and canola in bulk containers.
Our next biggest export is meat. Again, it is sold either as carcass or cut up in boxes. Some is also exported live; again unimproved.
Where the claim that we are feeding the many millions comes from is, I presume, in the calorific value of that food. We export calories in the form of unimproved foods.
The food we import is classified as: “Substantially and elaborately transformed”.
In other words, the food Australia imports has had value added to it. It’s in bottles, packets and tins; it’s what adorns the shelves and sits in supermarket fridges.
Many Australian food processors of old have either closed down or relocated overseas; bizarrely some now export to Australia food grown in other countries.
Did you know Heinz no longer lives in Australia? Next time you buy their baked beans, soups or tomato sauce, you will not be buying Australian. Heinz is just one of many.
“Clean and Green” and the “Food Bowl of Asia” was the aspiration in days gone by; now we import food from the EU, America, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. Nobody even raises an eyebrow.
DITCH
About 15-18 per cent of imported food comes from across the ditch and about 20 per cent from Europe.
How come, you may ask, New Zealand can afford to feed Australia? The answer is that they don’t, at least not on their own.
New Zealand has a Free Trade Agreement with China. New Zealand buys bulk frozen vegetables from China, repacks them under their NZ brand and exports to Australia.
Look carefully at the pack and you will see something like 10 per cent NZ & 90 per cent imported.
China is feeding Australia both through New Zealand and on its own. Eight per cent of the food we import comes directly from China.
Was that ever mentioned when all that fuss was made when China imposed cruel crayfish and wine embargoes on Australia? Did we retaliate and cancel food imports from them? Of course not!
Our supermarkets are also selling bottled fruit from China. Quite insidiously, the Chinese product is packed in a matching plastic bottle as that from Ardmona.
Has that been mentioned publicly? The Chinese, through our supermarkets, are attacking Australian fruit growers.
I have even seen jars of peaches from Bulgaria of all places.
It’s hard to believe that a country that grows the best spuds in the world imports potatoes and frozen vegetables from Holland.
They travel about 16,000 km in a freezer ship to get here. Yet they are competitive and often cheaper than what’s grown and processed in Australia. How can that be?
We are surrounded by oceans yet about 70 per cent of the fish we eat is imported, the majority, again, from New Zealand.
I don’t know if New Zealand more cleverly fishes the ditch between us and sells us the proceeds, or whether they’re importing fish and re-exporting.
Seventy to 80 per cent of the bacon and ham we consume is imported; again from Europe and America. How can it be cheaper to import processed pig meat than to grow and produce it in Australia? All fresh pork is Australian grown.
We grow the best wheat in the world, yet 10 per cent of the food we import falls under the categories of flour, cereal products and bakery. We import breakfast cereals from America and cakes and biscuits from the EU.
VAST
We grow the best durum wheat in the world, yet we import vast amounts of pasta from Italy.
We can grow tomatoes all year round in this country, yet Italy enjoys a 70 per cent market share of our tinned tomatoes.
If the Coalition were to formulate a policy to restructure and reinvigorate the great Australian agricultural industry from producer to processor and, in so doing, make this nation secure and self-sufficient in food again, they would be elected in landslide in the forthcoming federal election.
They won’t of course. The Paris Agreement and net-zero are more important to them. “Saving the world” seems to be the goal of Australian politicians – heaven knows why.
They will ignore the fact that China, America, India and Russia – who are not signatories to the Paris Agreement – produces 60 per cent of the world’s emissions.
All but one (Russia) thrive; while Australia (and much of Europe) decays as we attempt to “save the world”.
Nuclear power is the Coalition’s promised land, but that’s at least a decade away.
We’ve not been told what happens in the intervening years.
How easy it would be to join China, India and Indonesia and build a couple of state-of-the-art coal fired power stations or to utilise the massive gas field under Victoria.
Import substitution would be good for the national bottom line.
We would not want to – and cannot – replace all of our food and beverage imports. But it would be comforting to know that, if the world does go off the rails, we wouldn’t go hungry.PC
This is an Extensive Report from Scientists from 2019 >
THE NONGOVERNMENTAL INTERNATIONAL PANEL (NIPCC) ON CLIMATE CHANGE – 2019 – Climate Change Reconsidered II – Fossil Fuels – © 2019, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change and Science and Environmental Policy Project
Published by THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE
3939 North Wilke Road – Arlington Heights, Illinois 60004 U.S.A.
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is an international network of scientists first convened in 2003 to critically examine the reports of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Unlike the IPCC, the NIPCC is not a government agency and does not receive government funding.
Whereas the mission of the IPCC is to justify control of greenhouse gas emissions, NIPCC has no agenda other than discovering the truth about climate change.
Reviews of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science
“I fully support the efforts of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and publication of its latest report, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science, to help the general public to understand the reality of global climate change.”
Kumar Raina, Former Deputy Director General, Geological Survey of India
“Climate Change Reconsidered II fulfills an important role in countering the IPCC part by part, highlighting crucial things they ignore such as the Little Ice Age and the recovery (warming) which began in 1800–1850. In contrast to the IPCC, which often ignores evidence of past changes, the authors of the NIPCC report recognize that climatology requires studying past changes to infer future changes.”
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Founding Director & Professor of Physics Emeritus
International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks
“The work of the NIPCC to present the evidence for natural climate warming and climate change is an essential counterbalance to the biased reporting of the IPCC. They have brought to focus a range of peer-reviewed publications showing that natural forces have in the past and continue today to dominate the climate signal.”
Ian Clark, Department of Earth Sciences
University of Ottawa, Canada
“The CCR-II report correctly explains that most of the reports on global warming and its impacts on sea-level rise, ice melts, glacial retreats, impact on crop production, extreme weather events, rainfall changes, etc. have not properly considered factors such as physical impacts of human activities, natural variability in climate, lopsided models used in the prediction of production estimates, etc. There is a need to look into these phenomena at local and regional scales before sensationalization of global warming-related studies.”
S. Jeevananda Reddy, Former Chief Technical Advisor
United Nations World Meteorological Organization
“Library shelves are cluttered with books on global warming. The problem is identifying which ones are worth reading. The NIPCC’s CCR-II report is one of these. Its coverage of the topic is comprehensive without being superficial. It sorts through conflicting claims made by scientists and highlights mounting evidence that climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide increase is lower than climate models have until now assumed.”
Chris de Freitas, School of Environment
The University of Auckland, New Zealand
“Rather than coming from a pre-determined politicized position that is typical of the IPCC, the NIPCC constrains itself to the scientific process so as to provide objective information. If we (scientists) are honest, we understand that the study of atmospheric processes/dynamics is in its infancy. Consequently, the work of the NIPCC and its most recent report is very important.”
Bruce Borders, Professor of Forest Biometrics
Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Georgia
“I support [the work of the NIPCC] because I am convinced that the whole field of climate and climate change urgently needs an open debate between several ‘schools of thought,’ in science as well as other disciplines, many of which jumped on the IPCC bandwagon far too readily. Climate, and even more so impacts and responses, are far too complex and important to be left to an official body like the IPCC.”
Sonja A. Boehmer-Christiansen
Reader Emeritus, Department of Geography, Hull University
Editor, Energy & Environment
https://climatechangereconsidered.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Full-Book.pdf
See > 13 NATIONS SIGN AGREEMENT TO ENGINEER GLOBAL FAMINE BY DESTROYING FOOD SUPPLY
By Hunter Fielding
Global Research, June 18, 2024
News Addicts 14 June 2024
The United States has joined 12 other nations in signing a World Economic Forum (WEF) agreement that seeks to engineer global famine by destroying the agriculture industry.
According to the agreement, which was drawn up by the WEF and the United Nations (UN), food production is causing “global warming” and must be eliminated.
To “save the planet” from “climate change,” globalists insist, farms must be shut down across the world.
The WEF agreement sets targets for how much farmland each nation must eliminate in order to comply.
Under the guise of reducing “methane emissions,” thirteen nations have signed the pledge to engineer global famine by gutting agricultural production and shutting down farms.
Announced earlier this year by the WEF’s Global Methane Hub — a cabal of crisis engineers who exploit public panic to destroy the world food supply — those thirteen nations are:
Argentina
Australia
Brazil
Burkina Faso
Chile
Czech Republic
Ecuador
Germany
Panama
Peru
Spain
The United States
Uruguay.
Imagine no meat production from Australia, Brazil, and the USA.
This is the goal of the globalists.
And they admit it’s all part of the climate fraud which has been thoroughly exposed as a quack science hoax, by the way.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/13-nations-sign-agreement-engineer-global-famine/5860390
Let us all pray that huge numbers of the global population have now awoken to what’s really going on >
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos want “climate vaccines” laced into the food supply
https://crazzfiles.com/bill-gates-jeff-bezos-want-climate-vaccines-laced-into-the-food-supply/
My comment >
These alleged desperately unhinged, obscenely rich, power crazed globalists must be stopped by the world’s people.
The evil global agenda by alleged treasonous global politicians, elite, big pharma, big tech, big media, big medicine, WEF, WHO, UN et al is going to continue to wreak destruction on millions more people, our lives, our countries and we will be prisoners in our own world which will be permanently run as Totalitarian Regimes by these alleged tyrannical lunatics unless they are stopped by all the people of the world.
It is allegedly pure evil – controlling/reducing the world’s food supply is the ultimate heinous control over every person on earth.
Globalists order banks to stop funding meat producers to ‘fight climate change’
Global banks are ordered to stop funding and “debanking “the world’s largest meat and dairy producers as part of an effort to supposedly” combat climate change.”
The goal is to establish a global ban on the consumption of meat and dairy by bypassing legislative means, writesHunter Fielding.
The war on the global food supply is intensifying and major meat and dairy producers are now in the sights of a globalist collective of groups funded by the World Economic Forum (WEF), Bill Gates and the United Nations (UN)………………
https://www.frontnieuws.com/globalisten-bevelen-banken-om-te-stoppen-met-het-financieren-van-vleesproducenten-om-klimaatverandering-te-bestrijden/