The Hon. Warren Truss MP (until recently Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestery) gave a speech to the Victorian Rural Press Club in March in which he talked about the recently released ‘Agriculture and Food Industry Stocktake’ and some of the issues facing agriculture in Australia. The speech was big on the impact of changing community values on agriculture including the impact of campaigning by animal rights and environmental groups.
The Minister said that the Stocktake was a starting point for wide-ranging discussion under a newly formed Reference Group. This group was to report back to the Minister by the end of the year with a view to developing a “comprehensive policy framework to build, secure and protect Australian Agriculture”.
The Reference Group has since put out a fairly boring position paper which is very different in content to the Minister speech. The paper is apparently intended “to help focus the discussion”.
Part D of this paper is about natural resource management and seems to promote a lot of ideas that have been popular with bureaucrats in both government and the agripolitics for some years now.
It suggests that ‘stewardship payments’could be a ‘market based mechanism’ for paying farmers for public good conservation.
The position paper suggests that “farmers be paid for their output of environmental services such as biodiversity (for example, the management of wetlands for migratory bird habitats), improved air and water quality and other environmental and public health benefits. To be feasible, incomes from delivery of environmental services would need to at least offset any reductions in earnings from traditional agricultural enterprises that result from changed management practices”.
I know a fair bit has been written about this. But I fail to see how ‘the market’ could effectively operate given government bureaucrats (or government appointed committees) are likely to decide the terms and conditions and have all the money.
I would be interested in readers of this blog providing me with examples and/or arguments that challenges my current thinking.
I intend to make a submission to the reference group that will include some discussion of this issue.
There is more information at http://www.agfoodgroup.gov.au/tor.html.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Landholders throughout Australia would readily protect environmentally valuable portions of their land for a guaranteed recurrent budgetary allocation that is equivalent to the potential income earning capacity of that portion, just as surely as the insatiable appetites of bureaucracy would defeat such a proposition.
The notion of ‘market based mechanisms’ for ‘stewardship payments’ has been inscribed within national environmental policy for over thirteen years; just not acted upon. The undescribed nature of the incentive structures and market mechanisms confers a conservation economy.
Genuine ecotourism offers a feasible conservation economy. It is defined as responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and sustains the well being of local people. It has the potential to supplement and moderate the fluctuations of fickle rural economies and provide recompense and dignity to remote indigenous peoples.
Unfortunately, Ecotourism Australia has changed the international definition to ‘ecologically sustainable tourism with a primary focus on experiencing natural areas that fosters environmental and cultural understanding, appreciation and conservation’. An alliance between protected area managers and their commercial tourism operators made this change, even though the taxpayer conserves the environment and public service employment and commercial permit holders (predominantly from regional centres) eclipse the well being of local people.
To re-establish a conservation economy through ecotourism, the original international definition must be honoured and commercial tourism on protected areas should pay prices as they would on private lands, if only the millions of dollars of subsidy for protected areas were removed.
There is an increasing awareness and concern for the environment by the broader general public. It should only follow then that people accept that government funding could be directed towards projects that have a positive environmental outcome for the benefit of the wider community.
We have all of our property involved in a project called “Enterprise Based Conservation” that is run by West2000Plus. Our goal is to maintain 40% groundcover, regardless of the season, as it has been ascertained that when ground cover levels drop below this then the effects of wind and water erosion rise dramatically. There is a ‘public good’ as well as an improved natural resource management outcome involved in this project. Think of the dust storms over the last couple of years. My goal is to convince people that there is an economical as well as ecological benefit in maintaining higher levels of groundcover regardless of government funding, but if some need encouragement and incentives to get started then it would be money well spent.
On my commercial grazing property I confined the sheep into a feedlot on a small area of stable land when the ground cover became too low during the last drought.This protected the rest of the property and when the rains came the pastures quickly returned.This was a commercial decision which proved to be the right thing to do.There is no need for a taxpayer funded payment.
If someone wants to create a sustainable natural ecotourist park they should buy some land and make it attractive to tourists,charging entrance fees and selling mementoes of the visit.Once again there should be no subsidy.
If that someone just happens to be a Premier, sustainability is ignored and land is acquired and then subsidised to make it attractive to tourists by requiring no payments whatsoever. The great shame of the subsidisastion, is the exclusionary influence to fair trade across tenure.
John, the fact is there will be more and more tax payer funded dollars directed towards the environment, and rightly so I believe. The question is would you rather it was directed through private enterprise with like -minded goals and beneficial outcomes or wasted through bungled beaurocratic government run vote buying exercises. The project I’m involved in is costing a minute fraction of the national park system and I’m here on the ground managing it full time. I have no doubt that the tax payers will recieve a nett benefit in the longer term from what we are doing.
I’m glad that you were able to rest your country through feed lotting. We got our stock off the place completely, and they still are.