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13-11-2014, 09:45 PM
Nation too backward to make food bowl a reality: McGauchie
THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEMBER 14, 2014 12:00AM
Ean Higgins
Reporter
Sydney
PLANS to make Australia the food bowl of Asia will fail unless governments take hard decisions to address trade protectionism, decrepit transport infrastructure and declining investment in research, agribusiness leader Donald McGauchie has warned.
In a blistering speech to the F20 Global Food Security conference in Sydney yesterday, Mr McGauchie also criticised the coastal shipping industry as being a sheltered workshop of archaic industrial protection, making it often cheaper to ship product to the US or China than from one side of Australia to the other.
He said Australians needed to “get over the irrational fear of foreign investment” and clinch a free-trade agreement with China — “the holy grail of all FTAs” — even if it meant providing the Chinese easier access to invest in Australia.
Mr McGauchie also queried government-funded drought relief, saying that it did nothing to achieve the broader objectives of increasing agricultural productivity and exports. Mr McGauchie is one of the country’s most influential figures in agriculture and business, being a farmer himself, a former head of the National Farmers Federation, the chairman of major agribusiness concerns including Australian Agricultural Company Ltd, a former chairman of Telstra and a former director of the Reserve Bank.
Rather than prop up farmers who could not survive a drought, he said, it would be more efficient to “let small farms be rolled into larger, more efficient farms”.
“We have to take tough decisions if we are going to succeed”, Mr McGauchie said. “I don’t believe we can afford another decade of inaction and excuses.”
The conference heard earlier in the day from a senior executive of the Dutch agricultural finance group Rabobank, Berry Marttin, who said the world faced a global food crisis unless it worked out how to double agricultural production by 2050, by which time two billion more people would be on the planet, largely from Asia and largely in the new middle class.
“Food is so basic and people will do almost anything to survive,” Mr Marttin said.
Australia had by far the world’s highest arable land per capita, and though this had declined by a third since 1971, it remained perfectly positioned to cash in on a projected massive increase in demand in Asia for high-quality food.
Mr McGauchie echoed this view, saying Australia was “at the doorstep of one of the greatest opportunities ever seen”.
But he added that the nation suffered from “the erroneous belief that we will become the food bowl of Asia by default”.
To double production within 20 years, he said, the nation would have “to get our house in order”.
He said deteriorating infrastructure was making it harder to get produce to market, saying “our road and rail network is little better than third-world”.
Mr McGauchie said that while 20 years ago he used to transport the overwhelming part of his own farm’s produce to Geelong by rail, because of a decline in rail infrastructure he now had to transport most of it by road.
“The rail infrastructure has not been kept up for 50 years and now can’t be relied on,” he said.
THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEMBER 14, 2014 12:00AM
Ean Higgins
Reporter
Sydney
PLANS to make Australia the food bowl of Asia will fail unless governments take hard decisions to address trade protectionism, decrepit transport infrastructure and declining investment in research, agribusiness leader Donald McGauchie has warned.
In a blistering speech to the F20 Global Food Security conference in Sydney yesterday, Mr McGauchie also criticised the coastal shipping industry as being a sheltered workshop of archaic industrial protection, making it often cheaper to ship product to the US or China than from one side of Australia to the other.
He said Australians needed to “get over the irrational fear of foreign investment” and clinch a free-trade agreement with China — “the holy grail of all FTAs” — even if it meant providing the Chinese easier access to invest in Australia.
Mr McGauchie also queried government-funded drought relief, saying that it did nothing to achieve the broader objectives of increasing agricultural productivity and exports. Mr McGauchie is one of the country’s most influential figures in agriculture and business, being a farmer himself, a former head of the National Farmers Federation, the chairman of major agribusiness concerns including Australian Agricultural Company Ltd, a former chairman of Telstra and a former director of the Reserve Bank.
Rather than prop up farmers who could not survive a drought, he said, it would be more efficient to “let small farms be rolled into larger, more efficient farms”.
“We have to take tough decisions if we are going to succeed”, Mr McGauchie said. “I don’t believe we can afford another decade of inaction and excuses.”
The conference heard earlier in the day from a senior executive of the Dutch agricultural finance group Rabobank, Berry Marttin, who said the world faced a global food crisis unless it worked out how to double agricultural production by 2050, by which time two billion more people would be on the planet, largely from Asia and largely in the new middle class.
“Food is so basic and people will do almost anything to survive,” Mr Marttin said.
Australia had by far the world’s highest arable land per capita, and though this had declined by a third since 1971, it remained perfectly positioned to cash in on a projected massive increase in demand in Asia for high-quality food.
Mr McGauchie echoed this view, saying Australia was “at the doorstep of one of the greatest opportunities ever seen”.
But he added that the nation suffered from “the erroneous belief that we will become the food bowl of Asia by default”.
To double production within 20 years, he said, the nation would have “to get our house in order”.
He said deteriorating infrastructure was making it harder to get produce to market, saying “our road and rail network is little better than third-world”.
Mr McGauchie said that while 20 years ago he used to transport the overwhelming part of his own farm’s produce to Geelong by rail, because of a decline in rail infrastructure he now had to transport most of it by road.
“The rail infrastructure has not been kept up for 50 years and now can’t be relied on,” he said.