—The recurring floods in eastern Australia
and northern Western Australia have
devastated major food production areas of the
nation, wiping out huge chunks of wheat,
beef, and fresh vegetables production. The
total damage is as yet uncalculated, but reliable
estimates paint a grim picture for Australia,
and for the world food shortage. Preliminary
damage estimates run at AUS$10-13
billion; in reality it is almost certainly
AUS$100 billion or more.
The tropical and subtropical state of
Queensland has been virtually wiped out: An
area equal to that of Germany and France
combined was inundated (75% of the entire
state), decimating its two biggest economic
sectors, mining and agriculture, and most of
the supporting infrastructure. Queensland
supplies 28% of Australia’s consumption of
fresh fruit and vegetables, but it also accounts for 45%
of Australia’s meat exports (Australia is the world’s
second-largest beef exporter, after Brazil), 23% of live
animal exports, and 23% of fruit and vegetable exports.
The dramatic flash-flood in Toowoomba on Jan. 10,
when an 8-meter-high wall of water crashed through
the city with almost no warning, wiped out the state’s
last functioning food bowl, the Lockyer Valley. Central
Queensland food producer and longtime LaRouche activist
Maurice Hetherington gave an interview to this
news service on Jan. 13 (see below), and commented on
the situation facing Queensland food producers:
“They’ve lost just about everything, the second time
around in many cases,” he said . [1] Dozens of people have
been killed, and dozens more are missing.
The wheat situation is particularly alarming for the
world. Australia is the world’s fourth-largest wheat exporter,
and due to a debilitating drought in the wheat
belt of Western Australia (usually the biggest area of
wheat production), Queensland was set to be the thirdbiggest
wheat-producing area this season, after New
South Wales and Victoria, both also affected by floods.
As recently as December, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture
and Resource Economics (ABARE) estimated
that Australia was on track for record wheat production,
for the year ending March 31, of 26.8 million metric
tons, thanks to the plentiful rainfall on the east coast
this season, but that will now plummet. A substantial
portion of the crop has been damaged by the continuing
moisture which has caused sprouting, rendering it useless
for milling. This is happening even as Cargill, the
world’s largest food cartel, is, at this moment, buying
up the commodities division of the Australian Wheat
Board, whose single-desk export control was dismantled
two years ago.
Green Policies
In 1963, Britain’s Prince Philip founded the Australian
Conservation Foundation (ACF) as an arm of his
World Wildlife Fund, and the ACF-run Green mafia in
the country has stopped any dams from being built in
Australia for the past two decades, such as those championed
by LaRouche’s associates in the Citizens Electoral
Council. Had several long-proposed dams been built, the
flood damage would have been greatly mitigated.
But Australia’s agriculture is being devastated not
only by floods, but by the savage Greenie dismantling
of the nation’s primary food bowl, the Murray-Darling
Basin (MDB), one of the greatest agricultural miracles
in the world. The MDB contains 40% of Australia’s
farms, 75% of all its irrigated crops, and provides 30%
of Australia’s food, as well as food for some 50-60 million
human beings outside Australia; yet it is being shut
down at a staggering rate. Notwithstanding that the
MDB has been in a severe drought over much of the
past decade, Prince Philip’s Green fascists in the
Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) cut water
supplies to irrigators during that period by two-thirds,
diverting the water for environmental flows for “river
health” and to maintain wetlands.
In October 2010, the MDBA released its “Guide to
the Basin,” proposing permanent water cuts of as much
as 45%, to maintain some of the 30,000 wetlands in the
Basin, in fulfillment of Australia’s obligations under the
fascist international Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, a
subsidiary of the WWF. The prospect of the decadelong
drought being made permanent under the MDBA/
Ramsar Guide, has led to a virtual mass epidemic of
rural suicides in the MDB, and to the beginning of mass
foreclosures by the banks on the heavily indebted farmers.
The MDBA/Ramsar mafia has proclaimed that agriculture
in the Basin, particularly irrigated agriculture,
should basically be shut down altogether, and entire
towns and other areas of the Basin abandoned.
CEC Emergency Call for Action
CEC National Secretary Craig Isherwood on Jan. 15 gave an emergency Address to the Nation on this crisis, calling for LaRouche’s global Glass-Steagall standard and Four-Powers Alliance to defeat the British monetary system, debt moratoria for Australia’s farms, and a
mass infrastructure-building campaign, among other
things. His speech, “A National War of Liberation
Against the British Empire,” can be viewed at: http:// tinyurl.com/4eltx57.
