Remco, et al, I suggest you have a good read of the works of Fernand Braudel on the development of commerce and capitalism in Europe from the 1400's onwards. It is by far the best explanation of how the addition of a manufacturing and service sectors are not evidence of a decline in the importance of agriculture but rather, evidence of a capacity to maximise the downstream benefits that come from agricultural production.

It is knuckle dragging ignorance to simply view the value of farm gate production and then conclude that it is, therefore, dispenable. And your repetition of your cliche's indicates that you have learned nothing since the last time you flogged your particular horse.

The reason we apply multipliers to agricultural production is because it often becomes the raw material for further value adding.

The $25/kg steak in your supermarket left the farm gate at $2/kg so someone, somewhere, is adding a lot more value to it, especially if that Kg is divided into three parts by a chef and sold for $35 for each part.

And you can take your chances on the prospects for doing it all without locally grown cattle but there are very few economies in the world that are willing to pass up the local option if they can possibly avoid it. So when you have done so, successfully, come and tell us all about it.

The claim for one in a hundred years special circumstance assistance does not justify taxpayer moneys any more than anyone else who is forced out of business like one-half our manufacturing sector in the past few decades. Why do rural people feel special? I feel sorry if you are there suffering but why not accept money to LEAVE and put YOUR family first. But if you stay, put away ONE per cent of your income to cover that one in a hundred year circumstance - it's YOUR choice, not ours to support.

And on efficiency. There is TECHNICAL efficiency and ECONOMIC efficiency. You might be the most efficient producer of something, but that does not make you economomically efficient. You might be the most efficient hat maker in the world, but it might be cheaper to import them from Ecuador (sorry cliched).

So, the economically inefficient live cattle, cereals, cotton might have to go in favour of other activities (or let the land go fallow). That "inches of rain" sector might have to leave with tax payer money to help them. We have beautiful fertile abundant land and "Australia" has an international reputation, but the old school involved with inches, live exports, with "multiplier" arguments have to leave, graciously and with dignity. Perhaps one quarter revert but that 1%of GDP (dont talk multipliers Perseus) is quicky compensated by higher value activities (hey look at eg. NZ).

Droughts are a feature of rural activity and not for ingrained subsidy. Stay if you must, but dont cry martyrdom helping indifferent city people. It's your life, not mine to support.

Remco, you are either confused or dodging the question.

The economic efficiency of most farm commodities is not in question,
it can be shown for what it is, world leaders.

Our problems arise, once the stuff leaves the farm gate and gets
into your hands in the cities. With all your rules, regulations and
lack of efficiency, you seem determined to prevent manufacturing
from achieving those same world benchmarks as farming has.

Farmers plight is largely due to your choosing. If you freed up those
regulations a bit, for instance allowed the import of seasonal labour
into the meat industry, so that it can operate at its potential,
then farmers would be that much better off and no drought assistance
would be required. But as you seem determined to hold us up from
operating at our true potential, you deserve to cough up. So be it.

Yabby, I follow your argument about the need to give farmers assistance in a one in a hundred year drought, but what happens if , due to climate change, this turns out to be a one in ten year drought. Do we keep on encouraging farmers to keep farming less than marginal land. There has to be a limit.

The price that we currently pay for food is another area which needs to be looked at. The population at large, which includes some of the people on this page, need to realise that there is too big a discrepancy between what farmers are paid and what the consumer pays. I will give you three examples. In West Gippsland, milk leaves the farm gate at around 30 cents a litre and sells in the shop at around 115 cents.
The supermarket sells potatoes at around three dollars a kilo and pays the farmer 30 cents to deliver it to the store already packed in trays. Locally, grass fed beef sells at something less than two dollars a kilo to the farmer and the consumer pays between 10 and 25 dollars for the meat. The yield from the carcass is something better than 50 percent.

If farmers were paid a decent price for their produce, then they could put away a reserve for hard times, instead of having to go to the government. Realistically, we should be subsidising farmers all the time to make up for the way they are being screwed by the supermarkets and the middle men all the time. The drought assistance only partially makes up for that.

I came to Australia 44 years ago from Yorkshire. My family were not farmers, but I lived in an area where there were plenty of farms and many of my friends were farmer's sons. I regularly heard the stories about what happened when it was too wet/too dry. Or too hot/too cold, etc.

When I was in the hostel, I met a migrant who had been a farmer in the north of England. He told me that he was buying a large area of undeveloped land in the Wheatbelt through a WA govt scheme for 2/9d an acre. [28cents]. OK, 28cents was a lot more in 1962 than it is now, but still an apparently amazing bargain. He explained to me that his part of the agreement was to clear and fence the land at a predetermined rate and make it productive. I remember wondering if there could be a catch to this apparent generosity on the part of the govt.

I travelled extensively through WA as a sales agent and suchlike and was Wheatbelt manager for an insurance company in the 1970s. I saw the spreading salinity problems first hand and some of my clients would point to a salt lake and dead trees and tell me how it used to be a fresh lake with abundant wildlife. I also saw obviously very marginal land [even obvious to a Pom!] being released and farmers being encouraged to take it up, with the same clear and fence agreements which my friend had explained to me years before.

I also saw some of them struggling to handle the difficulties of profitably farming land which was probably basically unfarmable. Weatherwise, they were generally amongst the good years. I wonder how they are getting on now.

cont

A little different, but similar in a way. I also spent some of my early years here covering the forestry areas of the Southwest. Around Manjimup, Northcliffe etc, the big trees, at first glance, seemed to go on forever. But look beyond the facade of trees along the road margins and consider the rate at which the trees were being felled and even a Pom could see that the timber industry could not continue indefinately at such a rate.

We all know that big business doesn't give a stuff about anything as long as the profits roll in, but what were successive WA govts doing to allow things to get to where they are now?