Farms in drought and flooding pain
DROUGHT. “My road is fenced with bleached white bones and strewn with blind white sand. Beside me a suffering dumb world moans, on the breast of a lonely land.” The opening lines of the poem by Will Ogilvie still ring true 100 years after it was written, summarising the feelings of hopelessness of the creeping, insidious asphyxiation that too much of Australia finds itself in, year after pitiful year.
With much of NSW experiencing a deficit of rain for the past two years, and large swathes of Queensland experiencing six years of below average rainfall, there is much pain being experienced in rural and regional areas.
Suddenly, the national spotlight has fallen on the drought that has been slowly strangling our nation, and the media is finally telling the urban populations what is truly going on; the animal and human tragedy that has been unfolding for more than half a decade. The surge of public care and concern for the farmers is heart-warming and many are generously giving their money to help buy hay for the struggling farming community. The public pressure has caused governments to make “announcements of drought measures” for assistance to be made available for the drought-stricken states of Queensland and NSW.
The Prime Minister announced a $12,000 cash injection for drought declared farmers, which consists of up to $6000 in September followed by a further possible $6000 on March 1, 2019. My reaction to this? Amazement, followed by disbelief. So little, so late. To date the drought measures that have been in place consist of low interest loans and Farm Household Assistance that treats farmers like long-term unemployed, and which is only available for three and now four years in a farmer’s entire lifetime.
The National Drought Policy was dismantled approximately 10 years ago, and the powers-that-be then started talking about drought preparedness, and how agriculture had to ensure it could look after itself, independent of any public money. The Exceptional Circumstance trigger was removed, and agriculture was then left in freefall, at the mercy of commodity price fluctuations, government red and green tape, climate change policies out of the UN, and of course the weather. There is no national fodder reservation policy, so the huge amount of grain and hay that is produced each year is exported and only a small amount is left to fill the needs of our primary producers.
The number of registered primary producers stands at under 87,000, with the threshold to register for primary production status only being a minimum of $20,000 turnover per year. This then begs the question: just how many farmers and graziers do we have in Australia? At the risk of sounding alarmist, I really would like to know the critical numbers that we need to be farming in this nation before our food security is put in jeopardy.
#please pray for rain