In WA the agricultural lobby groups are at loggerheads on this - the PGA want the single desk abolished and the WAFF want it retained. The article may be right that the larger, more efficient producers don't want it retained, but the smaller ones do. Certainly there was a lot of disquiet last year when the world price moved well above the contract price, when growers were prevented from selling at the best price.

The illegal and immoral activities of AWB in Iraq in my view go way beyond going “over the top,” as Bruce Haig describes it. It is unfortunate that supporters of the single desk feel they must also be apologists for AWB’s disgraceful conduct

Good on you, Country Gal, as an old cockie going on 87 who got Honors in political philosophy in his retirement, helped support my parents and family during the Great Depression.

Also must tell Tapp it was Pollard a Labor PM who agreed to bring in the agrarian single desk to get rid of Bunge and Dreyfus who as major grain buyers were wroughting the farmers with prices varying from 3/6 a bushel down to 1/8 owing to poor communications.

It was when Pollard agreed to try and guarantee wheat cockies the cost of production by forming an agrarian Board to get rid of the greedy middle-men, as they were called.

The big district of Dalwallinu comprised gentry-style wealthier farmers to the south supporting the PPA Primary Producer's Association, which was tied in with Big Biz and to the north and east were members of the WGU, called the Cockies Union because most were ex-miners and battlers.

So with the help of a Labor PM, the battlers won out, and we are now in a sense long back to the Roaring Twenties when good prices gave little need for the Unionised Boards evolved as the result of the Great Depression.

As I tell my grandkids now running the family properties, competition is really not part of farming, because farming especially in our country districts was and should still be simply as way of life, sport especially being part of it.

That is why get-together unions are so important for country business, proven more important in rural areas like Australia where we have to put up with droughts as well as with the money-grubbing Big Biz now known as the Corporate Culture.

Cheers - BB, WA.

BB, Farmers do need to realise that they need to conduct their enterprises as a business in order to survive in the long term. My comments above dont try to suggest otherwise. In particular farmers need to be a bit smarter about getting returns for themselves, including from the AWB (or whoever they deliver their wheat to). I believe that the single desk does assist world competitiveness as a whole, but even away from that stage farmers can help to shore up their own returns. As bulk commodity producers they will always be price takers rather than price makers, but there are still ways and means by which to increase you own margins (of course if everyone wised-up it mightnt work as well). The first is investing in on-farm storage. Too many farmers still run all their grian into the AWB silos at harvest, and suffer the depressed prices at harvest as a result. The smarter ones have bulk storage capacity and store grain to sell throughout the year. Others mix their grain - blending poorer quality grain with high quality, to get more through at higher prices. This is exactly what the grain traders do, so farmers might as well benefit from the practice. The final tool is the use of hedging products. There are various tools out there that can help shore-up price risk and generally speaking farmers dont make enough use of them.