By Jim McIlroy
BRISBANE — I wonder whether those intoxicated by the triumphal hysteria of recent weeks about the "end of Communism" are capable of realising the bitter irony: while Australian farmers being forced to plow their crops under because of low food prices, thousands continue to starve in Third World countries such as Ethiopia.
In the Brisbane Courier-Mail, a series of reports have appeared outlining the rural crisis and its dramatic consequences.
One, headed '"Worthless' crops destroyed", began, "Thousands of cases of lettuces are being ploughed into the ground in the Lockyer Valley as the rural recession hits harder than ever.
"Framers are being forced to plough in crops because they cannot afford to harvest.
'"There is a real atmosphere of despair. Farmers are at their wits end', a leading Lockyer Valley grower, Mr John Bishop, said yesterday [August 8].
'"I've ploughed in at least 15,000 cases of lettuce. There will be hundreds of thousands of cases chopped in the Lockyer this year.'
"Mr Bill McNeil, a potato and onion grower at Tenthill, believes many producers will have gone to the wall by Christmas.
'"I've been in this business 37 years and I have never seen so many potatoes left in the ground and stored on farms.
'"We are getting $6 a bag or S120 a tonne for our spuds when it costs up to $250 a tonne to grow them.
'"My father used to tell me about the terrible depression in 1932. Now I an seeing it for myself', he said."
An article in the August 27 edition reports, "Millions of rotting tomatoes litter the ground in the Bowen district because a market disaster has brought one of the country's top farming districts to its knees.
"More fruit will be wasted than reaches the market this season because growers cannot justify the cost of harvest.
"Thousands of tonnes of tomatoes have been written off, with
healthy fruit-laden vines slashed and ripped out of the ground."
Queensland Farmers Federation president Lyndsay Hall said: "Rural Queensland is bleeding to death, and unless there is a tourniquet applied very soon it is going to become very ugly.
"Farmers are traditionally not militant, but the ripples of anger in the bush are growing", Hall said.
He blamed the federal government and the banks for ignoring the plight of farmers and letting them go to the wall.
Other reports detail the human tragedy of farm families being forced off the land by bank foreclosures, often brought on by massive loans at vicious interest rates.
Meanwhile, as Australia's small farmers are being crushed between soaring bank debt and low prices, we read in the same paper about the desperate plight of thousands starving and dying of disease in war and drought-ravaged ravaged Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Courier-Mail writer Susan Hocking describes the horror of mass hunger and illness in the overflowing camps surrounding Addis Ababa, in an article entitled, "They came to bury the baby".
One camp she visited, formerly Emperor Haile Selassie's polo field, is now "a sea of tents, filled to overflowing with families ravaged by malaria, relapsing fever — caused by lice infestation — and hunger".
Hocking explains that aid from Australia is just beginning to trickle into the area, and urges support for the Community Aid Food for Life Appeal.
But what sort of New World Order is it that can allow such absurdities to continue: crops being ploughed under in Australia for lack of a market, while people are dying of starvation in the Third World?
Is this system, capitalism, which brought us the pillage of Africa and Latin America, the Gulf War slaughter and butter mountains and food destruction in the West, the best that human history can create?
It would surely take an extremely depressed and twisted mind to think so.