I must have touched a nerve recently with my two articles calling out Woodside’s dangerous precedent of buying up Wheatbelt farmland in their desperate attempt to appease the carbon gods (‘Woodside, We Don’t Want You as Our Neighbour’ and ‘Woodside’s Carbon Farming Plan is Destroying Family Farms’, in Farm Weekly, on my LinkedIn and on Australian Rural & Regional News). Since being published my phone has been running hot with other examples of mining corporates quietly buying up farmland around Australia to do the same thing.
One such example is South32, a name familiar to WA residents from the big sign on the tall building in the Perth CBD. Some may even recall they were spun out of BHP back in 2015 to focus on bauxite, alumina, coal, and copper—anything but iron ore. Today, South32’s portfolio includes the Worsley Alumina mine at Pinjarra, a surface strip and rehabilitation process that’s been ongoing for nearly 50 years, taking forest or farmland, extracting the bauxite, and then returning it to forest or farmland.
Unfortunately, South32’s decision-making has recently gone south. For some reason, they now feel compelled to offer “offsets” on top of their standard mine rehab process, over and above any approval requirements. Under the State Government’s Environmental Offsets Policy, any offsets are only to be considered after avoidance and mitigation options have been pursued, as offsets are not appropriate or even required for all projects.
Hence there is no requirement for a mining company to undertake an offset when it already has a tried-and-true mitigation program in place, approved by the government—something South32 has a 50-year track record of completing. So, it’s disturbing to read in a recently released EPA document that they propose to follow Woodside’s example and ‘sterilise’ over 4,000 hectares of freehold land—good farmland—as a means of appeasing the environmental gods.
The economic value of the agricultural land that is being sacrificed is enormous—probably close to $50 million, before adding another $21 million to establish the pseudo-jarrah forest. Then there are the management costs, the value of foregone agricultural production, and the loss of 10,000 tonnes of grain, similar to Woodside’s efforts—enough to feed 100,000 people a year (make that 200,000 people a year if you add in Woodside’s efforts).
In this case South32 own the land, so it’s theirs to do with as they please, but who told them it was a brilliant idea to sterilise it by turning it back to bush? This is the same mad formula Woodside is following: take freehold cleared farmland and ease their guilt by planting trees that will never be harvested, with the land lost to agricultural production, including tree farming, forever.
As I’ve argued in my other articles, this move by big multinationals to buy green and government brownie points at agricultures expense is a huge risk to the 5,000 broadacre landowners who sit on the State’s 18 million hectares of freehold farmland. It implies that farmers are oppressive occupiers of the land and that cleared land is the ultimate sin, a sin that can only be washed away by returning it to the Edenic paradise of pre-settlement.
But fear not, as the Greens and government have found a saviour for the sinners to follow. We are now blessed with modern-day messiahs in the form of mining companies like Woodside and South32, ready to bless the earth with the return of trees that will wash away the sins of the past. The end result is the “rebirthed” forest that will be a blessing for all, a gift to the gods made by these mining behemoths.
No doubt further blessings will follow as the newly replanted soil is gifted to local Indigenous groups to manage at taxpayers’ expense, while the mining company can sin away, now that they have found a way to pay penance for their guilty behaviour.
The end result? The loss of our farmers and the bread and olives they produce. The loss of land to trees means these toilers of the soil will have to take up jobs as servants of the State or, in the ultimate irony, working for those mining companies that took their livelihood from them. If the farmers are lucky, they might even be allowed to continue working on their old farms as firefighters when it all goes up in holy smoke.
And what have we achieved? We don’t need more conservation estates; any look at a state map shows a steady increase in new reserves since clearing was banned in 1983. What we need is better management and funding of existing conservation estates. We need to control the ferals (the animal version), thin the excessive small trees, and conduct more regular and frequent prescribed burns to prevent catastrophic fires. Even better, we should be allowed to harvest old-growth forest again, to grow, harvest, and regrow, using wood as our new main building product, rather than a one off carbon sequestration hit of set and forget.
If the EPA’s offset system were followed as written—it’s only four pages long and not hard to follow—the South32 sinners would recognise that revegetation of existing mine sites they had cleared is more than enough penance to stay in business. There’s no need to sterilise good farmland out of a misconstrued vision of sainthood.
If these companies are in desperate need to purge their guilt, they could go on a pilgrimage around the state looking for alternative ways to spend their $71 million in guilt money. For instance, South32 could fund feral animal control around the large area of state forest they operate across or finance volunteer fire crews to undertake more prescribed burns.
This movement by the big resource companies to target the states farmland has to stop before it gets out of control. The Minister for Regional Development needs to step in and run the ruler over the economic implications for country towns if this is allowed to continue.
I’m not the only one calling out this madness. Forestry Australia, the national peak body of the timber industry, has rightly jumped up and down. It’s time we stop bowing to false idols and return to practices that truly honour our stewardship of the land—before the last grain of bread is sacrificed on the altar of misguided penance.
Australian Rural & Regional News welcomes a response from any of the businesses or parties mentioned in this article.