Wheat fields and battle fields

Historically, millions upon millions of acres of Australia were deforested and stripped to grow wheat, for the profit of corporations. The men who slaved on the farms were usually paid a pittance and often died before their time. The loss of wildlife habitat has been immeasurable, and Aussies have made more species extinct than people of any other nation.

That's the great Aussie wheat story, although not the one they teach kids in primary school.

The Australian Wheat Board (AWB) used to be a nasty government monopoly which marketed all the country's wheat around the world. Now it's been privatized and it's just an ordinary nasty monopoly. Now it's embroiled in controversy due to accusations that it paid the Saddam Hussein regime $300 million in kickbacks during the Oil For Food Program.

The guys in suits who run the AWB are just the kind of people who would have argued at dinner parties that we should invade the towelheads. Who said there is no honour among thieves?

The New Iraqis are not happy with the AWB, not at all, because the kickbacks Saddam received helped him torture and maim their fellows. They have put a temporary ban on the AWB. The usual suspects -- Australian media, politicians and agribiz interests -- are screaming and bleating that it will be a disaster if Iraq bans Australia selling it wheat in perpetuity, so the Prime Monster John Howard in desperation is sending his Trade Minister to Beautiful Downtown Baghdad to fix things up. The Jurassic Labor so-called Opposition under Kim 'Bomber' Beazley thinks this is a good thing too.

The Trade Minister, not a Jurassic but a Pleistocene creature, has laval rocks in his head so he's packing to go into the eye of Howard's war-storm. "He'd better pack his flak jacket, too," I hear you say.

With luck, he will fail in his misguided mission. The continent wants him to fail. Mother Nature is pleading with the Iraqi 'Government' that he will fail. One of the best things that could happen to Australia is for weeds to start growing in broadacre wheat fields, and agribiz fields of all kinds, because weeds form the first storey of regeneration and there's a chance that a bit of Australia might take root in their shade.

Australia has 20 million people on a continent about the size of the USA, with just about every known climatic region existing on this continent. Everything you can put in your mouth on a fork grows here. Blind Freddy can see that there's no need for it to import or export food at all -- it's a 19th Century paradigm for a 21st Century landmass, a paradigm created not by people but by huge companies for profit.

Permaculture holds the disarmingly simple solution to this and most other pressing planetary problems, and will save oceans of polluting oil because fossil fuels are quite unnecessary when food and other resources (fuel, fibre, timber, etc) come from where you live instead of the other side of the world.

The AWB scandal merely serves to bring Australia's tragic folly into high relief, but anything that reveals it can only be a welcome thing.

Tagged: permaculture, environment, deforestation, corporations, australia, globalization, agribiz