Category: Sustainable Settlement and Agriculture

From Farm Online

The boss of Woolworths’ fresh foods division, Michael Batycki, says there is a misconception that the supermarket giant rejects “an awful lot” of its fruit and vegetable deliveries.

“Rejections (of fresh fruit and vegetables) are a small part of our business, about 1 percent of deliveries,” Mr Batycki said.

“There is a misconception out there that we reject an awful lot of product.

“That perception in the main, seems to come from people who don’t deal with us directly,” he said.

Another furphy was that Woolies and its fierce rival, Coles, exercised a virtual duopoly in sales of fresh produce such as fruit, vegetables, beef and lamb.

Roy Morgan Research data told a different story, Mr Batycki said, with Woolies holding a 27pc share of fresh fruit and vegetable sales and Coles 20pc.

“We are in a minority and have to compete strongly in the marketplace,” he said.

“The independent sector in Australia is very strong and they do a wonderful job.”

Similarly for beef and lamb, new Roy Morgan research showed butchers sold more serves of beef and lamb than did any other retailer in Australia in 2008.

Butchers finished the year with a 30.8pc market share of beef and veal and a 31.6pc share of lamb, just ahead of Woolworths with 29.1pc and 29.8pc of beef and lamb respectively.

Mr Batycki was talking during a visit to Woolworths’ regional distribution centre at Minchinbury, on Sydney’s western outskirts, one of nine across the country which pack fast-moving goods, including fresh farm produce, for delivery to the company’s 800 supermarkets.

The distribution centre was buzzing with electric-powered pallet transporters whose operators were being directed via microphone-equipped headsets as they picked up produce stored on racks in a network of chillers and assembled them for shipment to individual supermarkets.

While some produce goes direct from farm to individual supermarkets, most of it is delivered by the company’s 500 accredited suppliers to distribution centres like Minchinbury where loads are matched against Woolies’ tight specifications by specialist staff.

All rejected produce (which is stored in a chiller) has to be picked up by suppliers in line with Woolies’ policy of openness and transparency.

Mr Batycki said suppliers were fully aware of the company’s specifications which, in many cases, had been written by its growers and adopted by other sections of the industry.

He said Woolies had strong and long-term relationships with most of its local grower suppliers and sourced about 95pc of its 20 million kg of weekly fresh produce sales ($2 billion a year) from them.

Imports of fresh produce were limited to counter-seasonal activities when a crop wasn’t available in Australia (for example, navel oranges in summer and table grapes in winter).

This policy wouldn’t change even if Biosecurity Australia opened the door to more fruit imports including apples from NZ.

Woolworths was continually encouraging local growers to fill seasonal production shortfalls and varietal gaps and had been working for the past six to increase local garlic production to replace imports from South America and China, Mr Batycki said.

And Mr Batycki said Woolworths intended to stick with its local suppliers, despite Biosecurity Australia’s recent decision to allow imports of cavendish bananas from the Philippines under strict conditions.

Victorian forestry workers in conjunction with government departments have lit fires in at least five national parks since the February bushfires to capitalise on public sympathy for controlled burning to reduce the fuel load.

Immediately after the bushfires, News Limited media and talk back radio stations ran concerted campaigns to blame the bushfires on a lack of controlled burns leading to an abundance of fuel. Scientists who presented evidence that forests opposing the burning, claim they have not been given a fair hearing.

A study commissioned by Environment East Gippsland indicates that many Victorian forests are more than 500 years old. Coordinator Jilll Redwood said that forests become less vulnerable to fire if they are not burned regularly, that most fires are started by arsonists and that old forests store vast amounts of water and carbon dioxide. “This is a critical component in our carbon emission reduction,” said Lindsay Hesketh of the Australian Conservation Foundation

The National Farmers Federation is proceeding with plans to make international agribusiness companies paid up members of the lobby group. The invitation to the national conference in Brisbane this June, overtly invites representatives of agribusiness to attend, subtly reminding working farmers of the plan mooted last October to allow agribusinesses to be affiliate members with 40 percent voting rights. The South Australian and West Australian farmers federations have left the national body and raised concerns about the conflict of interest between farmers and international corporations.

Check the program and invitation

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When Bathurst doctor Carole Hungerford graduated in the late 1960s, breast cancer was late-life disease diagnosed in about one in fifteen women.

“Now the surgeons are saying it’s one in eight, perhaps one in seven,” Dr Hungerford said.

“And a lot of it is the young person’s cancer, the aggressive one.

“We didn’t even look for it 40 years ago.”

What’s happened? According to the author of Good Health in the 21st Century, we’ve stuffed up.

“Nature didn’t stuff up, we stuffed up. Modern humans have been on the planet for 200,000 years, and in the last few decades have we thrown out a lot of challenges to the body,” she said.

“We’ve started putting chlorine in the drinking water, sulfates in the wine, additives in the food … people don’t know where they are getting their headache from because they are reacting to everything.”

At the same time, Dr Hungerford says, people are getting less nutrient from their food.

“Some of us are eating good food grown in bad soils, or good food that is not fresh. More of us are eating bad food that is neither fresh nor grown in good soils.”

For many people, the result is an immune system compromised on one hand by lack of resources to do its job, and on the other by a raft of environmental challenges that the human body has never before encountered.

According to Dr Hungerford, a host of modern diseases have their roots in this situation: cancer, arthritis, asthma, autism, Alzheimers, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease, to name a few.

Teasing out what is behind these diseases, which are swallowing the health budgets of Western nations whole, has been a long obsession for Dr Hungerford.

It culminated in her 2006 book—among other things, a short course in human biochemistry—which swelled the waiting list at her practices in Bathurst and Balmain out to three months and more.

Health is complicated, something that changes from individual to individual, but after years of research and medical practice, Dr Hungerford has come to believe health starts in the soil.

“I think if we were all eating organic foods growing in pristine volcanic soils, and we didn’t process that food—so if we ate rice we ate brown rice, and if we ate wheat we ate whole wheat—I think we’d conservatively slash our health budget by 70 per cent,” she said.

This may be a logistical impossibility, particularly in Australia and its old, depeleted soils, but Dr Hungerford feels that farming practices, and food processing, need to develop practices that better acknowledge the vital health component of food.

In the meantime, she believes that “most, if not all of us” needs to supplement their diet with key minerals like zinc, selenium, calcium and magnesium.

That’s not a common view in the medical profession, which Dr Hungerford believes is one of the reasons that health services everywhere are foundering against a tide of ill-health.

In focusing on “the disease model” and the science of curing disease, Western medicine and related policy has neglected the science of prevention.

“In America, one per cent of the cancer research budget goes into prevention; 99pc goes into other areas—early detection, and looking for the magic bullet. Or it goes into support groups,” she said.

“That’s all supported by the medical profession. We cure disease. Where’s the excitement in prevention?

“Even Medicare isn’t funded for prevention. If you come and see me and say, ‘Look, I feel terrific, and I want to stay that way, can you advise me how to do that?’—that’s not covered under Medicare.”

In her book, she eloquently argues that prevention of disease begins with soils capable of growing nutrient-dense food; with food supply chains that nuture that nutrient through to consumers; with consumers willing to eat a balanced, healthy diet; and with a general willingness to stop fouling the environment with toxins that are making many of us sick.

“I think it’s an idea whose time has come,” Dr Hungerford says.

“Once your mother and your sister and your best friend’s wife have all got breast cancer, young, you start to think what’s happening—what’s gone wrong?”

In her experience, a lot has gone wrong, and is still doing so.

Signs that this is the case recur every time she does an interview: afterwards, the desk staff at her medical practises deal with a barrage of phone calls, explaining to desperate people that her waiting list already stretches months ahead.

“I don’t need any more patients, but it’s a message that needs to be told,” Dr Hungerford says.

A senior economist advising Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull on the federal government’s emissions trading scheme has warned that a key component of the coalition’s climate policy has yet to be scientifically proven.

The Australian Financial Review reports that Centre for International Economics executive director David Pearce has said biochar, which involves storing carbon in soil, requires more scientific analysis and would work only if Australia adopts a carbon price.

But Mr Pearce condemned the government’s handling of the ETS debate, claiming it had failed to provide any analysis on the short-term costs of the reform or whether other mechanisms, such as a carbon tax or a hybrid scheme, could cut greenhouse emissions more cheaply.

Mr Turnbull has claimed the coalition’s climate policy could deliver deeper emission cuts at less cost to industry by placing greater emphasis on measures such as energy efficiency, soil carbon sequestration and biochar.

But Mr Pearce told the committee that although biochar had potential, it was not yet ready.

“I’m not sure that all the science is in,” he said. “In order for [biochar] to be economic, you would need to have a carbon price in place.”

Read Rachel Siewert’s speech.

National Farmers Federation press release.

FARMERS, scientists and environmental groups will be mystified by the findings of the Senate Inquiry into the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act), which misguidedly attempt to shift the EPBC Act away from sustainable ecological development to a destructive ‘lock up and leave’ focus.

“This can only result in poor environmental outcomes through feral pests and diseases and heightened bushfire dangers across habitats, all of which can potentially wipe out the very ecological communities and endangered species the EPBC Act is supposed to protect,” National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) President David Crombie declared.

“I fear Senators simply do not understand the environmental issues on their plate. Under a ‘lock up and leave’ approach there will be little, if any, active management of the environment on the ground, including essential weed and pest control, fire management, fencing or enhancing biodiversity through planting vegetation.

“Such an approach is in stark contrast to the Australian Government’s commitment to the NFF’s Environmental Stewardship initiative, funded under the 2007 Federal Budget, which embraces the benefits of actively protecting environmental assets – backed by farmers, scientists and environmental groups.

“Beyond the obvious environmental problems such a retrograde move would create, neighbouring landholders, principally farmers, would be lumped with all of the negative impacts on their properties.

“Further, the recommendations also add greater and unnecessary red tape, which contravenes the Council of Australian Governments (CoAG) agreement to move away from the added costs and regulatory burdens of bureaucratic processes. Indeed, shedding red tape in the primary sector has been one of the Productivity Commission’s key commitments since its 2007 Red Tape Review.

“The Senate Inquiry’s findings seek to impose new federal requirements where state provisions, covering the very same issues, already exist. Ultimately, this extra red tape would see funding diverted from resources to protect ecological communities and endangered species on the ground, in favour of more bureaucracy.

“The Senate Inquiry recommendations are out of step with government policy and environmental science.

“Resources should be invested in extending the Environmental Stewardship program to cover more, if not all, of the ecological communities and endangered species listed under the EPBC Act, as the NFF detailed in our Federal Budget Submission 2009.”