By Michael Rafferty
The alternating cycles of drought and flood, scarcity and abundance, good seasons and bad, are part of the rhythms of rural life. But the current rural crisis is unlike any other since the 1930s depression.
Two events of religious significance symbolise the scale of the crisis. In the first, drought-stricken farmers in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland have been gathering in country towns to pray for rain.
Without the arrival of good rains, many of these farmers will join the growing numbers of people heading off the land. After several poor seasons, many have run out of money and patience and have sold up. It has reached the point where fiercely individualist farmers are accepting food parcels just to keep body and soul together.
But even good rains may not be enough to save many farmers. Global markets are awash with grain, and wool and world prices are at historic lows. According to the president of the Queensland Graingrowers Association, Ian Macfarlane, the combination of drought and depressed grain prices has dealt many farmers the fatal blow.
"In real terms, the price of grain is one-sixth of what it was 10 years ago", Macfarlane told the Weekend Australian recently. What he didn't say was that, with a continuing cereals price war between the USA and the EEC, grain prices are going to be stuck at the low tide mark for several more years.
The second religious event is prospective. It is perhaps the most bizarre and ungodly of all religious events. There are growing calls from the high priests of market economics for the Wool Commission to burn the $2 billion wool stockpile. It is said that burning the wool would be a way of triggering a recovery in the wool price.
If this were not a serious proposal it might be funny. That it is a serious option typifies the barbaric logic of our current existence.
The stockpile represents probably the most efficiently produced collection of fibre produced in human history. It is a triumph of human endeavour. The horrible irony of destroying the labours of thousands of wool growers and shearers must add a second blow to graziers. Already they have destroyed hundreds of thousands of sheep because it is no longer economically possible to feed them. Shearing costs alone are often greater than the return on the wool.
Supporting the proposal to torch the wool stockpile, Queensland Premier Wayne Goss recently said that a "more creative" solution was needed than just a bit of drought relief. Goss said the stockpile hangs over the wool price, and its "creative destruction" should be considered even if it just has a psychological effect. Lets hope he doesn't become a psychologist when he retires from parliament.
The most barbaric aspect of the proposal to burn the wool is the daily sight of people who have not enough clothes, shelter or food. Whether it is Somalia or Bosnia, Siberia or Soweto, there are literally millions of people without the basic necessities of life. And here we are proposing to burn one of the most durable and renewable clothing fibres.
It seems that, when worshipping at the altar of profit, no human sacrifice is too great.
The widening gap between rich and poor around the world has made more obvious something that has been a continuing feature of history for the last 200 years. Our society is not organised around production for need, but production for profit. Needs count only when backed by the capacity to pay. Those without the capacity to purchase their needs do not have them met. On the other hand, we are told that we must satisfy every craving (such as luxury yachts or vintage wine) of some yuppie and that doing so is crucial for national economic recovery.
National Farmers Federation executive director Rick Farley has encouraged many farmers to accept this reality and leave their farms while they still have some "dignity and equity". Many farmers are now finding out that the same logic that has led the NFF to attack workers in the building industry, on the waterfront and in meat processing is now being applied ruthlessly to themselves.
As farmers are reduced to a sort of wage worker for banks and farm suppliers, their condition more and more approximates the insecure and oppressed position of urban wage workers.
None of this suggests that farmers and urban workers are about to join in a common struggle. But farmers are rapidly coming down to a choice between two paths.
One is to turn in on themselves and blame it all on an international conspiracy or some such. This would probably include calls for EEC-type subsidies and further opening up of the trade war. Such a view has the virtue of simplicity, but won't address the basic problems of farmers — the need for an income to sustain them in the current crisis.
The other path is to demand a minimum income from the state, and demand that surplus production be distributed for those around the world in need. These are precisely the demands that
urban workers and farmers around the world are raising in their own struggle for survival.