In 1971 the United States Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz spoke wisely and bluntly about the perils of organic farming.

 “Before we go back to organic agriculture in this country, somebody must decide which 50 million Americans we are going to let starve or go hungry.”

Since then, the religious movement known as the Green Left continue to believe that going organic offers the world a peaceful and bountiful future.

Those of you who are old enough to remember the dust storms of the pre-chemical era of ploughing and working back would be quite rightly highly sceptical of such claims.

Just as those who can recall the nightly TV images of starving kids in countries like Ethiopia and India before the benefits of the 1960s Green Revolution of hybrid varieties, ag chemicals and fertilisers, helped end third world food shortages.

But these lessons have been forgotten or ignored by the globetrotting elites who specialise in speaking on behalf of the half billion people who live on a dollar a day.

They promise a better world, a world without the evils of corporate farming or multinational chemical companies, a world of small farmers using organic, regenerative and biodynamic farming systems, a world of healthy food. 

What they don’t talk about is the cost of producing this food.

They are the same elites who fly around the globe championing an end to fossil fuels and pushing aggressive new targets to address climate change, the same ones who ignore the impact that these policies will have on energy prices, the price of grain or the world’s poorest people. 

Access to cheap energy is directly related to the production of cheap food, but who wants to talk about that when there is a planet to save.

For a globe that needs to keep growing food productivity and production at a pace that it can comfortably feed a population of 9.5 billion by 2050, up from today’s 7.7 billion, we need to  embrace more industrial farming technology not less, we need ever more sophisticated chemicals, new GM crops and cheap energy.

Unfortunately, the Green Left movement is growing in its power, our federal parliament now has a record number of Green and Teal MPs who all believe in a fantasy world free from the hard trade offs that are needed to address the needs of those who go to sleep at night hungry. 

Their goal of fast tracking our way to carbon neutrality by 2050 is likely to be a slow motion rerun of what Sri Lanka recently went through with its experiment in going organic.

Sri Lanka, an island of 22 million, is so small it would fit within our Wheatbelt – Great Southern regions, but unlike our 5000 farms they have 2 million, with an average size of just 2 hectares. 

In a moment of madness, their government recently attempted, to ban imported chemicals and fertilisers and switch the entire country across to organic farming.

They had been captured by the promises of the global Green Left.

The title in the flyer above states it all;  ‘Regenerative Organic Farming for Economy of Permanence and Prosperity for All’. Such a claim should have rung alarm bells to the agronomists and economists in their Department of Agriculture.

Mind you, I would suspect their senior departmental officials, like ours in DPIRD, were too scared to take on their political masters and point out the scientific and economic fallacy in the promise that Regenerative + Organic = Prosperity.

Rather, they would have sat mute, just as ours do when MacTiernan’s own regen guru, Charles Massey appears in WA to read from his bible The Call of the Reed Warbler and prophesises the Green Left creed of good vs evil, biological good – chemical bad.

The President of Sri Lanka, Rajapaksa, was swept up in this new religion and became convinced that agricultural chemicals were killing the soil, impacting production and were the cause of a range of serious diseases.

It was only by growing produce free from chemicals and synthetic fertilisers that Sri Lanka’s agriculture would rebound and the population be healthy again.

In April 2021, the government followed the regenerative pathway to prosperity and made the insane decision to ban the importation of all artificial fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides.

Just like that, the country became 100 per cent organic overnight.

And overnight the President became the champion of the global Green Left, elevated to the status as a global leader and invited to a United Nations Food Summit where he said his policy was aimed at ensuring “greater food security and nutrition” and encouraged other nations to follow Sri Lanka’s example.

Rajapaksa even promised to compensate any farmer that faced a decrease in production after switching to organic farming. The savings made from the agrochemical ban and ending fertiliser subsidies would provide the money for this indemnity.

The decision also saw a rush of snake oil salesmen heading to Sri Lanka offering organic fertiliser by the boat load. The government took the bait and imported 99,000 metric tons of seaweed fertiliser from China.

It was only a matter of time before economic and agronomic reality caught up with the government.

First, the fertiliser was found by the National Plant Quarantine Service to be full of harmful bacteria and warned that it was a real health risk to any end produce it touched, leading the government to start backing away from its health claims about organic fertiliser.

Without fertiliser, farmers dropped a third of their planned planting. Within four months the first of the annual harvests were in, with predictable results, a yield fall of 35 per cent for rice, 50 per cent for tea, 50 per cent for corn, and 30 per cent for coconut

The ban devastated the country’s primary export and its second most important source of foreign exchange – tea.

The end result was violent protests, soaring prices at the markets, inflation and currency collapse. The government suspended the policy in February this year, ten months after it was imposed.

When the food riots began, one thing you could not see were the global champions of organic farming.

They had long moved on to the next gullible Minister for Agriculture, touting their regenerative chemical free nirvana and along with their climate change friends were busy demanding that more be done to end access to cheap fossil fuels and cheap fertiliser.

Unfortunately, not all Ministers for Agriculture are as wise as the American Earl Butz, who 51 years ago predicted famine if organic farming systems were adopted. 

But then, the new religion is not interested in people, they don’t care about the cost of food or the importance of cheap reliable energy, they don’t believe in science and dismiss market economics as they have faith in the modern prophets.

The Minister for Agriculture has resigned

That got your attention. But no, it’s not our beloved WA Minister but the Netherlands Minister for Agriculture Henk Staghouwer.

That Minister resigned last month when he worked out that having the job of reducing the country’s agricultural production by about a third to meet their legislated emission reduction targets was making him deeply unpopular.

Effectively, he was responsible for telling 11,200 farms or piggeries they have to close and 17,600 others they had to reduce their livestock numbers.

Dutch farmers had finally worked out they were the ones to pay for the government’s aggressive emissions reduction targets, just as the Canadian and New Zealand farmers are also starting to work out that this talk of emissions targets, once translated into legislation as it has been in Australia, translates into a carbon and methane tax or caps on production.

Unfortunately, the political promises of the market coming to the Dutch farmers aid and paying them more to compensate for these new taxes has not eventuated.

It seems the global agricultural and food traders, wholesalers and retailers are refusing to pass emissions costs on when they can buy grain and meat from Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Russia and Ukraine who continue to sell produce free from any carbon levies.

Effectively the Dutch, Canadian and New Zealand farmers have been conned. Expect to see something similar here by our state and federal Ministers for Agriculture, expecting consumers to pay more to compensate for the coming carbon and methane taxes.

Only recently WA’s Minister MacTiernan aggressively repeated this wishful thinking of the market paying premiums when questioned at the AGEIC forum about her past stance on GM crops. 

According to her, she was only against GM crops because the market did not want them and was prepared to pay a premium for WA remaining GM free.

A line also run by the late Kim Chance when he was Minister for Agriculture who doggedly held the line on locking out GM crops on the basis that the state’s farmers collectively picked up a premium for being seen as a green nirvana.

It’s the same religious madness that infects the ALP with their anti-nuclear stance; we can mine it but only three mines, we can inject nuclear isotopes into people made from our own reactor at Lucus Heights but we can’t build a power plant because it’s the devil’s power.  

It’s the head in the sand attitude that refuses to watch the rest of the world benefit from nuclear power or at the same time GM crops. 

It took the Barnett government to drop the final GM bans in 2016 but by then farmers in the U.S. were growing GM corn, cotton, soybeans, canola, sugar beets, alfalfa, papaya, potatoes, apples and summer squash on over 175 million acres.

In the 20 years of commercialisation of biotech crops (1996-2015), the United States generated an additional US $72.9 billion by going GM and reaping higher yields.

As a result farmer adoption rates for the major biotech commodity crops were 92 per cent for corn, 94 per cent for soybeans, 98 per cent for cotton, and 100 per cent for canola and sugar beets. 

Whereas the market for organic grain remains stubbornly small at 1 per cent of total production in the US.

I have no doubt that if our Minister for Agriculture had been MacTiernan instead of Baston in 2016, she would never have approved the change, preferring the narrative that farmers would pick up a bigger collective premium for the state remaining GM free. 

Just as we are today hearing the narrative that we have nothing to fear from carbon and methane targets as the market will pay farmers a premium to be carbon farmers. 

The Labor Party clearly does not understand the market.

Like the nuclear debate, the Labor Party turns itself in knots to justify its position. No government can be taken seriously if it rules out technology like GM or nuclear power based on emotional Green Left values when they are supposed to be the ones that care about the poor and reducing carbon emissions.