State level naivety prevails at Shepparton meeting

State level naivety prevailed at a recent Shepparton public meeting.

Victoria's Minister for
 Agriculture, Peter Walsh.

Victoria’s Minister of Agriculture said the state’s farms would double their production by 2030.

Mr Peter Walsh, who agreed earth’s climate was changing, argued human ingenuity and technology, along with the will to achieve an outcome, would see climate change lowered in importance.

In keeping with the stance of most climate change deniers, Mr Walsh supported his arguments saying it had been dry and wet before, and would be that way again, with a poignant example from his family’s history.

That story, with huge emotive power for the 200 at the meeting, overlooked it being an isolated event from the 20s and 30s that does not compare to 2013, which was riddled with significant weather catastrophes around the world, driven by a seriously disrupted climate system.

Obvious during Mr Walsh’s vision for the future was an ignorance, wilful or otherwise, of the collision of world circumstances making the realization of the Minister’s dream strikingly difficult, if not impossible.

It will be problematical to bring this cornucopia of food imagined by Mr Walsh to market for various reasons, among them the fact that a disrupted climate will change every growing circumstance; the implications climate change will have on water supplies; a serious depletion of energy, both in terms of oil and electricity; and a shortage of the fertilizers used in abundance to enrich Australia’s ancient and less than fertile soils.

The reality is that the earth is warming, humans are responsible and we can no longer expect the same result from the same effort, using techniques and ideas that filled our larders, even as recent at two decades ago.

Farming as we know it has a limited future and because of the atmospheric damage caused by the burning of fossil fuels, along with the inequality arising from the ruthless focus on profit and growth, we stand on the cusp of a future in which localism will prevail and the imagined riches of the South-East Asian markets will be out of reach.

Minister Walsh visualizes record harvests of grain, meat, fruit, dairy products and anything else that can be extracted from Victoria’s less than giving soils, with that produce being funnelled to the hungry and welcoming Asian people.

The reality that farming is not again going to be what it was, ever, was not something that could be discussed rationally and reasonably at the Shepparton meeting as farmers were not there to hear how success tomorrow depended upon them rejigging their operations

They were there to hear a debate between the Government and its Opposition, but within the confines of what they knew and understood, not how they needed to invent a whole new way of farming.