Food for thought
So we’ve heard through the (non-irrigated) grapevine that letters being sent by the dam proponent seem to be quite focused on “food security”. In fact one letter to a person whose land needs to be acquired for the Emu Swamp Dam project contained no less than 4 references to “food security”. The sub-text seemed to be that unless the person in question agreed to sell their land for the dam we would all be in peril of having insufficient food on our tables.
Can this be true? Is “food security” in the Granite Belt region, or more broadly in Australia, a significant concern? The short answer would appear to be, not really. Agriculture makes up 12% of Australia’s GDP. Of course not all of this is exported. While most Australians are still pretty keen on the occasional steak they would struggle to chew through the excess 2.34 million tons of beef and beef products that are exported every year. Australia is the second largest beef exporter in the world.
And we do like some bread to complete our steak sarnie but how much wheat do we need for “food security”? At the moment Australia consumes about 20% of the wheat produced in Australia. The remaining 80% is exported. That is a lot of bread for steak sarnies.
While beef and wheat are the major food exports of Australia, in total they make up only around a third of Australia’s food exports. The rest of Australia’s food exports include lamb, mutton, vegetables, citrus fruit, nuts, sugar, honey and barley not to mention the more exotic food exports like mangoes and bananas.
The reality is that Australia is a vast producer of a wide range of meat and vegetable products all of very high quality which are much sought after on the international market. Australia, including the Granite Belt, is certainly not a place where there is any risk to its inhabitants of “food insecurity”. So, we wonder, where have these concerns about “food insecurity” come from? Quite frankly, your guess is as good as our’s ...
(All statistics sourced from worldatlas.com)