Showing posts with label agriculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agriculture. Show all posts

Thursday, 28 May 2015

PRA: Landowner denied rights must not be repeated


Photo sourced - The Chronicle
Premier Palaszczuk’s election campaign launch speech promise[1] to reinstate the repealed Vegetation Management Act (VMA) could almost be forgiven as being ill informed but now after 100 days in office for the Premier to outline it as a priority task to be achieved is highly alarming. In a letter to the Minister for Natural Resources & Mines Anthony Lynham, the Premier gave the direction to,[2] "Re-instate the vegetation protection laws repealed by the previous government to reduce the clearing of native vegetation”.  


Property Rights Australia is most concerned that senior members of the Palaszczuk government, including the Premier herself, have failed to grasp that the VMA was not repealed but amended[3] and amended modestly at that. Unlike the over the top approach taken in resource legislation, the Newman government amendments to the VMA were restrained, responsible and restored basic tenets of our legal system; civil rights that the wider community take for granted but had been denied to landowners. There have been many column inches devoted to the horror of the reversal of the onus of proof under the so-called “bikie laws”[4] including by the Labor party.[5] Qld was the first jurisdiction in Australia to reverse the onus of proof[6] and it happened under the Beattie Labor government’s Vegetation Management Act.[7]  We expect this type of attack on the Justice system not to be repeated 

The current government should be wary of pressure by various “green groups” which are continually being proved to be lacking in substance or in touch with real situations impacting real people in Queensland at this time.  Activists with an environmental agenda have lost no time in getting in the governments ear with the incorrect notion that the VMA had been repealed and landclearing is again out of control.  Published articles by a group of academics calling themselves “concerned scientists”[8] show little scientific integrity, deceptive selection of the facts and exaggerated conclusions.  WWF in its latest Living Forests report[9] devote a whole chapter with the use of “projections” to forecast a resulting deforestation from changes to environment legislation.  WWF believes that your brigalow suckers are “critically important” and without a word about compensation of production loss to the landowner states the desire to see brigalow regrowth to mature for 30 years to provide wildlife habitat. Typically Dr Tim Seelig, Queensland Campaign Manager for the Wilderness Society makes gross exaggerations,[10]

”The LNP substantially weakened land clearing controls in Queensland, resulting in a return to large scale clearing and an impending tree clearing crisis on a massive scale.”

In responding to questions in the Queensland parliament on May 13 from the Member for Warrego Ann Leahy, Dr Lynham said that,[11] “we have no plans to change those specific portions such as the self-assessment criteria.”  PRA believes to revert back to the old arrangements of a deadly slow time frame to obtain permits to harvest the self-regenerating acacia mulga crucial for drought fodder would defy logic.[12]  

With 80% of Queensland in drought it is most likely graziers concerned for the welfare of their livestock; feeding mulga will most likely be the greatest contributor to any increase in the area of land clearing.[13] Mulga is well known for its ability to re-establish itself.
Gidgee trees are notorious for encroaching
Photo sourced ABC Rural - New tree clearing laws in Queensland

Going by where the most fervour of the radical environmentalist is directed, provision of clearing for high-value agriculture[14] is the area most at risk for attention by the Palaszczuk government. Tim Seelig in his dedicated vehemence says,[15]

“The LNP approved at least five massive land clearing projects in northern Queensland, including at Olive Vale. Those five projects total 113,000 hectares. Other approvals include almost 60,000 hectares at Strathmore Station in the Gulf Country.” 

To provide some perspective Qld is a large state covering 1,727,000 square kilometres with over 200 national parks covering 6.5 million hectares.[16]  Most agricultural production essential to feed our population by necessity occurs off land that is thinned of its vegetation or a large percentage cleared.  Land has been set aside for different purposes and its time environmentalists reserve full conservation management to National Parks only and don’t transfer these expectations to agricultural production systems. The introduction of the VMA caught large tracts of north Qld under developed with landowners uncompensated for declining production.  

Recently the federal member of Leichhardt, Warren Entsch, gave some perspective of the clearing being undertaken at Olive Vale calling activists claims, “emotional clap-trap.”[17]  Mr Entsch owned Olive Vale up to the early 2000’s said that,

“He believed the area to be cleared – which represents less than 10 per cent of the station – was mostly open country with few trees. 

“There’s not a lot of agricultural opportunities in Cape York, but those areas that have been identified through the scientific process are areas where we should be going, giving an economic opportunity for people living in the area,’’
 
It is rather inconvenient for the environmental activists the recent release of the international scientific paper, ‘Recent reversal in loss of global terrestrial biomass’[18]  that showed vegetation in Australia has actually increased with the encroachment of trees into grassland a key factor. Dr Bill Burrows in a 2013 paper, “Bushland at risk of continued tree and shrub thickening in Queensland” wrote,[19][20]

“Many other land types were, and remain, subject to increased “thickening” of the over-storey or sub-canopy tree and shrub cover, or both, over time. Likewise trees are actively encroaching on some native grasslands . Examples of this changing structure and composition of the vegetation include mulga thickening in country east of the Warrego River, gidgee encroachment onto Mitchell grasslands , increased eucalypt cover in the Desert Uplands and Central Highlands/Burdekin Catchment  and tea tree invasion of grasslands in Cape York. Even National Parks and reserves abutting grazing land are subject to ongoing tree thickening e.g. the disappearing grassy balds of the Bunya Mountains, acacias invading grasslands on Moorinya N.P. and rainforest invading wet sclerophyll forest in the wet tropics.”

 
Rural Queensland does not need a repeat of the full extent of the poor archaic Beattie Labor government legislation that was enforced in a vindictive, punitive manner.[21] [22]

 As stated by Premier Palaszczuk in her directive to Dr Lynham,[23] “it is important to achive the best outcomes for Queenslanders” and “to make all decisions and actions in the public interest”.  To reverse the current strict guidelines already in place for tree clearing in Queensland will not deliver the best outcomes for Queenslanders and as seen in the past, replacing cooperation with coercion and heavy-handed administration creates more problems and is not effective or productive.
Another downgrade in crop yield is possible
Photo sourced ABC Rural - the hot issues as Queensland

 
PRA has been aware and is highly concerned that in recent months of DNR&M staff appear to have been given directives to find someone to hold up as an errant example to what would appear to be an excuse to review the current tree clearing legislation to appease election promises made to green groups.  Legal firm Ferrier & Co principle Tom Marland recently made the statement based on evidence from a number of clients who have been subjected to formal inspections last month that,[24]

“it was clear from the imagery and mapping that DNRM were not inspecting irregularities but were inspecting properties to support prosecutions.

“DNRM have sufficient information to determine whether charges should be laid. The purpose to inspect and speak with landholders is to falsely obtain a confession or some form of omission of guilt.”
 
PRA strongly advises landowners that if departmental staff approaches them on a land clearing matter to immediately seek legal advice. In these circumstances usual country hospitality and openness should not apply.


Previous published related article
 

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Sunday, 5 April 2015

Activism drives land clearing exaggeration



Mulga woodlands, photo sourced [here]

‘Drought drives mulga hunger’, an article published late February in the Queensland Country Life warned of extremist environmental groups using the increased tree clearing rates in the Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) report due in August to pressure the Palaszczuk Government to introduce new restrictions on vegetation management. We didn’t have to wait that long as in late March a group of “concerned scientists” had the opinion article published, ‘Land clearing in Queensland triples after policy ping pong’ published on The Conversation web site,  that used the QCL article dishonestly as they omitted the reasons given for the increased rates.
To wax lyrically about Queensland’s woodland and forests being lost is deceptive when there is no breakdown yet available between remnant and non-remnant vegetation.


No mention was made of the largest contributor because of drought, with 80% of Qld drought declared, the feeding of the regenerating acacia, mulga, as invaluable fodder to livestock.

The coal seam gas industry has made a contribution with the construction of three export pipelines that take the gas to the port of Gladstone, 2 of which are around the 540 km’s in length and extensive infrastructure including the clearing for gas wells, in field pipelines, very large water storages, compressor stations and water treatment plants. Other contributing factors include mine sites and urban encroachment. This did not fit the environmental paradigm as the article falsely claimed that the Vegetation Management Act had been rapidly watered down by the Newman government bringing back broadacre land clearing for agriculture.

To the contrary the Newman government amendments were modest including the restoration of basic tenets of our legal system, civil rights that the wider community take for granted but were denied to landowners under the Vegetation management Act.  The clearing of remnant vegetation remains extremely restricted. The “concerned scientists” berate the removal of high value regrowth from the Act which is a nonsense invented by environmentalists and ignores that their high value regrowth is encroaching on high value pastures.  In the research report, ‘Recent reversal in loss of global terrestrial biomass’, published on March 30 2015, vegetation in Australia has actually increased with the encroachment of trees into grassland a key factor. The report states:
“We also found unexpectedly large vegetation increases in savannas and shrublands of Australia, Africa, and South America. Previous analyses have focused on closed forests and did not measure this increase.
On average, Australia is “greener” today than it was two decades ago. This is despite ongoing land clearing, urbanisation and the recent droughts in some parts of the country”
Mean annual change in vegetation biomass between 1993 and 2012. Blue represents an increase; red a decrease.
Image modified from Liu et al., 2015.                          image sourced [here]


The “concerned scientists” article, ‘Land clearing in Queensland triples after policy ping pong’, is alarmist and attempts to make very broad associations to pull at the heart strings. For example:
“There are 778 species listed as “Vulnerable” or “Endangered” in Queensland. Loss of habitat is a major threat to most of them. In addition, 45% of Queensland’s ecosystems are threatened because of land clearing”

The opinion article fails to give any data at all that any clearing has been allowed where there is endangered fauna and flora.  It also pulls out a favourite trump card of the environmentalist of a calamity about to fall upon cute and cuddly, in this case the koala, with no substantiated specific data in direct correlation to the projected increase in SLATS figures.

 The core proposition by the “concerned scientists” and where they are seeking political action is:
“But in 2012, a newly elected Liberal-National government rapidly set about watering down many aspects of environmental legislation. The Vegetation Management Framework Amendment Act 2013 brought back broadscale land clearing for agriculture, and the protections for high-value regrowth on freehold and indigenous land were removed.”

Again this can clearly be demonstrated as an exaggeration. The Newman government elected in early 2012 did not bring its first amendment to the Vegetation management Act until May 2013. Hardly rapidly! Far from a complete “watering down” of the Act, the amendments in May and December 2013 were in the scale of things modest and most certainly necessary.  Amongst the amendments was the restoration of civil rights denied to landowners under the Vegetation management Act and improvements were made to how the Act worked such as the application for fodder harvesting of mulga which retained a code of how drought feeding to staving livestock was to be conducted. Also the introduction of guidelines for vegetation thinning to counter the environmental and production problem of thickening as authenticated by a lifetimes work by internationally renowned woodland scientist Dr Bill Burrows. The term high value regrowth was always without foundation and was rightly removed. This is after all land that had been cleared and is being maintained for agricultural production.

The article recites the so-called “litany” of perceived problems of land clearing as if they are automatic in every instance and without background which points out instances where improved grass cover from clearing actually decreases erosion and improves water quality but that does not fit within the environmental paradigm. There is not much science to this article but much environmental activism.

Most agricultural land clearing is undertaken on land that had been cleared once before. The fact is that most agricultural production essential to feed our population by necessity occurs off land that is thinned of its vegetation or a large percentage cleared.  Land has been set aside for different purposes and its time environmentalists reserve full conservation management to National Parks only and don’t transfer these expectations to agricultural production systems.
Editorial 26th March 2015 Queensland Country Life














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Wednesday, 13 August 2014

Russian sanctions are the least of our agriculture sector's problems

By Mark McGovern, Queensland University of Technology

First published at The Conversation 

Australia’s dairy sector will lose out due to Russian sanctions,
but there are bigger issues in play. Anatoly Maltsev/AAP
Russia’s targeting of $A400 million of Australian food exports and the government’s muddled response are just the latest setback for a sector struggling under failed policy approaches.

Agriculture is Australia’s only “strongly competitive industry”, according to recent reports from consulting firm McKinsey and the Business Council of Australia (BCA). Yet, the industry is today characterised by high levels of debt, low farm income, depleted reserves, increasing levels of insolvency and rising poverty. Why the mismatch?


Productivity is high in agriculture. Indeed productivity performance has been outstanding. Yet profits and incomes have been miserable for years. To top it off ABARE reports current Queensland farm incomes as the lowest for 37 years (which is when their figures began).

We’re measuring the wrong things


Measures of both competitiveness and productivity can increase when an industry is in decline. Today, agriculture is not where we hoped it would be. Existing policies and thinking have not delivered gains for agriculture in real terms (as evident in the graph) or Australia (as rising net overseas obligations demonstrate). Continuing them is folly.


A rocky path of questionable returns.
McGovern, M. (2013). Repositioning Rural Australia. Choices in Agricultural Policy: Rationalise or Reconstruct? Merredin WA, Muntadgin Profit Farmers.


Disappointingly, this failed stance sits behind the “new“ veneer in the BCA’s “Building Australia’s Comparative Advantage”. Under its dated take on comparative advantage, economies of scale still rule. The productivity mantra is repeated regularly but profit is never mentioned by the BCA, and incidentally mentioned only twice by McKinsey. Yet profit and sustainable incomes lie at the heart of sound business and investment servicing.

It’s 1997 thinking. Then, Minister for Primary Industries John Anderson convened a Rural Finance Summit in Canberra. The thrust was similar. Scale was the saviour and the message was that over a quarter of farmers must go. We overachieved - more than 40% or 103,000 farmers went during the Howard-Anderson era.

The reality is economies of scale require enterprises to increase operational size, utilise the latest technology (such as limited till farming and GPS navigation), employ advanced managerial systems and so on. Increased farm size requires larger machinery and equipment to replace labour intensive farming. All this takes money, yet financial considerations have been essentially absent.

Farm sector reforms have now created a sector with 20% of farmers producing around 80% of output from an increasingly untenable financial basis. Aggregation costs were neglected.

As asset inflation was thought never to end, debt-to-equity loans were not designed to be repaid from income. Capital gains would pick up any shortfall. But as stresses built and the GFC unfolded with pervasive capital losses, the economies of scale arguments and poor lending collapsed. Untenable loan-to-valuation ratios ushered in a financial crisis in national food production.

Large highly mechanised “efficient” enterprises were suddenly expected to repay multi-million dollar debts from insufficient income. Foreign buyers acquired most significant Australian food manufacturers and many farms.

What next?


Untenable financial arrangements need restructuring. The sector needs recapitalisation, new institutional arrangements and, for a time, a hands-on approach from government.

Today, the numbers of bank foreclosures and bankruptcy proceedings challenge the mantra makers. Financial numbers that don’t add up, and often never did, trash empty pseudo-economic rhetoric. Incomes going nowhere will not service the recent debt run up, as is evident in the graph below. Systemic failures allowed this development.


Debt has outpaced the ability to service it.
Ben Rees (2013) Reconstruct or Rationalise Agriculture? Compiled from: NVFP, ABARE, Commodity Statistics, Rural Debt , RBA online, Table D9


Yet, despite Foreign Minister Julie Bishop stating “the Australian government will do everything in its power to minimise the impact on Australian farmers“ of the $400 million disruption from Russia, Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce “would hope that we’re able to manage it without direct assistance”. Ongoing "do nothing (but hope)” emptiness is destructive. Why is abject market appeasement still the first preference in Canberra - but not elsewhere?

The real structural reform needed is in industry, governmental and BCA thinking. Scale and competitiveness policies that have failed to deliver need to be discarded, not re-veneered.

Real solutions require substantial considerations of income, investment and profitability under uncertainty. Finance matters as do market and supply chain realities. Policy makers have avoided these things for too long, to the great cost to agriculture, other infected industries and Australia.

Ironically today, the despised low-productivity small farmer with household off-farm employment may be more solvent than the aggregator or the competitive.
The Conversation

Mark McGovern is an active member of the Rural Finance Roundtable Working Group.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
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