In Western Australia where the strong overseas demand for base metals could mean the big corps and the little share capitalists are sitting pretty the ordinary honest farmers not doing so well. First, the dairy farmers who are getting rorted by big business, many close to the cities selling out because land prices luckily have kept high. Fruit growers are also in trouble with globalisation and the free market allowing too much cheap low quality fruit to come in. Also even infected meat from Brazil which has been secretly dumped because our dear government wants to escape trouble.

Wool is also in trouble, but the worst problem recently has been the severe drop in the price of wheat, our government not giving a tinker's cuss about it, because the main culprits are our dear global anti-terrorist partners who have let George Bush allow 80 billion dollars over the next ten years in grain subsidies mostly for the US graingrowing MidWest.

Sorry to be cynical about it, but our wheat farmers now should be encouraged to become agrarian socialists be it right or left, and tell our goverment and their mania for the free market to go to blazes, because it is only the corporate grain buyers and petty share dealers who will gain.

The above is not new news to oldies who remember the Great Depression when wheat farmers jacked up and got what they wanted, a guaranteed cost of production. Looks like it might have to happen again, so watch out Mr Howard and those so-called National Party farmer's reps you've got under your thumb, you could be heading for a mighty lot of trouble out in the sticks.

Dear Saul, sorry to butt in again but from one who is going on 85 and reckons he knows more than a bit about wheat cockying - and also has a degree in international relations and a post-grad in economics, must give reminder that wheat growing ins Australia is being carried out in what is known as perfect competition. A rather ridiculous term, which actually means that because the product is usually sold en-masse, it is not really competitive all, the prices generally having to be arranged by a higher authority, or with agrarian socialism the way our wheat was sold from around 1935 till the 1960s being handled by government, big companies such as Bunge, Dreyfus and Cargills, who used to have their own stacks in the bagged days not even mentioned.

Some say that the company names again re-appearing in Australia, gives reminder we are back to the 1920s again. To again mention agrarian socialism which may sound like communism, but it happens to be that the agrarian socialists in pre-Soviet Russia who as the Socialist Revolutionary cavalry who helped Lenin and Stalin take over were actually the Kulaks whom Stalin had slaughtered or sent to Siberia because though they refused to become collective in their farm management, they did not mind their grain being marketed collectively, as it is now, and possibly always will be as long as the middle men are discreetly watched by government.

George C, WA. Bushbred