A LACK of monitoring will see foreign companies and governments target Australian farmland, writes LESLIE WHITE
If you were a foreign government wanting to ensure future food supply for your country, you would target farmland in Australia.Because you would be mad not to.
Australia has clean water and fertile soil.
It has good irrigation infrastructure, which is about to be improved, and great proximity to Asia.
But best of all for foreign companies and governments, Australia's laws on foreign investment in agriculture are so lax it is laughable - and the Federal Government has no intention of changing them.
You can buy land now and start sending the food back to your own country pronto, as Qatar government-owned Hassad Foods is already doing.
While other countries require reporting of foreign investment in strategic assets and are unapologetically patriotic about it, the Australian Government is about as interested in this issue as it is in the Glengarry Town Hall's casserole night.
Take this example.
Foreign purchases of residential property in Australia are monitored and scrutinised - purchases by foreigners must be reported to our Foreign Investment Review Board, even if they're buying a one-bedroom flat in Footscray.
Foreign purchases of farms valued at less than $244 million (this threshold actually rose $13 million last week - go figure) are not.
That amount of money, at $10,000/hectare, would buy you 24,000 hectares - an area 16 kilometres by 16 kilometres.
And you could buy 20 farms that size if you liked, in fact you could buy 100.
In city terms, that area would stretch from Canterbury (that's east of Hawthorn) to Altona and from Reservoir to St Kilda.
The seller would probably throw in some water for you, too.
And you wouldn't even have to inform the Australian Government, because it doesn't care.
Not that we should have to choose, but which is more important to this nation: ownership of a few city units, or control of food-producing land and water?
The Government should pull some of the manpower currently devoted to assessing foreigners buying residential property and use it to assess whether foreign farm raids are in the national interest.
Our farm estate is already shrinking as mining, urban development and plantation forestry take more ground. And as climate change reduces rainfall, the water already bought up by foreign entities will become more precious.
Australia needs to require standard reporting of sales of agricultural land to foreign interests and it still needs exact information on ownership.
The Federal Government's recent survey went out to only 10,000 of Australia's 120,000 farmers - and only 8500 of those responded.
The Government also needs to instruct the Foreign Investment Review Board to take its responsibility in assessing whether a sale is in the national interest seriously.
The approval of the sale of 43 farms at Gunnedah to a Chinese government-owned mining company is a joke - if we're paying the FIRB to conduct robust assessments, we've been wasting our money.
The FIRB has never refused a sale of agricultural assets to foreigners and must stop acting as a rubber stamp.
And the rural community needs the National Farmers' Federation to genuinely bat for it on this issue.
The proudly free-trade economic rationalist federation has paid only lip service to the issue so far. It says, "foreign investment has been very positive for farmers".
The NFF stance has effectively left key Nationals to fight the issue on their own.
Foreign companies and governments may rush to buy Australian farmland this year, because a Coalition election win in 2013 would see scrutiny of foreign ownership increase.
The Government claims foreign ownership levels are low. But even if they are, we shouldn't wait until the horse has bolted before we shut the gate.
Until we close the latch, foreign companies and governments looking to shore up food supply will spend billions getting control of Australian farmland.
Because they'd be mad not to.
- Leslie White is The Weekly Times' national affairs writer
