We need to eat.
And we need to retire comfortably.
If I can fault one thing in this supermarket duopoly-bash, it is the attention given to food security.
There is never enough.
The science behind Julian Cribb’s book The Coming Famine is not difficult: there are too many people growing in number with a global economy now geared to rely on infinite growth in a world that has finite resources.
Our Petri-dish will one day run out of space, food, or both.
It happens countlessly in any high school bacterial growth experiment and to every other species along the evolutionary tree right up to the one with both the opposable thumb and Tik Tok with which to put that thumb to use.
Once we have blown our resources or outgrown our arable land, that’s it.
There is no spare earth in the cupboard; in fact, David Suzuki pointed out once that even if there was a Planet B, the exponential growth of our species would mean that we would have exhausted it in about 10 years in any case.
Farmers need as much investment and profitability as possible to be as high-functioning as possible to ensure food security.
Equally, it can be argued that the shareholders in supermarket stock should be entitled to retire comfortably, as superannuation and its equivalent is the largest portion of investment.
And without supermarkets, the harvests would simply not get sold.
The anecdote given last week of one farmer being pressured to accept a $300 per tonne drop in price by one of the supermarkets needs to be offset by the claims that the big chains invest heavily in agriculture with numerous programs.
Four ‘investments’ were listed off in one of the chain’s submissions and I find fault with each one:
Providing interest-free loans and grants only to organic farmers (who comprise less than one per cent of growers); developing the ‘Odd Bunch’ range for produce that doesn’t meet quality standards (says whom that they don’t?); providing quick payment to growers (should do anyway at your size); being flexible when conditions or weather events impact size or quality (you actually have no choice).
This is not even tokenism invested into Australia’s future.
Tallin, the capital of Estonia, has joined Luxembourg and other European cities in providing free public transport to its citizens.
Clearly a cost to the public purse, it works well in a non-false economy because people will travel further and spend what they would have on a tram ticket on something retail instead, churning the city’s business over which is clearly a preferred outcome.
Farmers need to be afforded that kind of consideration.
I suggest supermarkets write off their fresh fruit and vegetable sections and see the financial loss as an investment into not some twee ideal of keeping our farmers leaning against a tractor with some decent profit, but a genuine nod at the fact that our farmers don’t just warrant survival, they need to develop further and better into a future that will become far more challenging.
The fresh produce department in a big supermarket needs to take a hit for the team: pay the farmers what they demand and invest in a real future beyond the next balance sheet.
Food security at one end of the food conduit needs to be strengthened much more than the retirement funds that support the elderly at the other.
We won’t run out of old people, but we can easily run out of food.
Andy Wilson writes for Country News. He is a pre-peer review science editor in a range of fields and has a PhD in ecology from the University of Queensland.
