Letter to Tony Burke

Hon Tony Burke MP
Minister for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries
2 December 2007

Food or paper? A question of priorities.

Dear Minister,

Congratulations on being returned to government.

Our organisation, A Better Australia, has been helping a number of community based groups in understanding the impacts and costs of the pulp mill proposal, in particular the threats to food production created by the allocation of priorities to forestry to the exclusion of all else, particularly agriculture, in Tasmania.

We write to ask you to closely examine the balance between forestry and food production. We seem to somehow have government priorities focussed on paper production at the expense of food and water. Subsidies and laws are heavily biased towards pulpwood production which threatens rural communities and food production industries, particularly as the pulp mill approval will pick up the pace of logging and speed up the conversion of farmland to plantations, thereby depleting the water in our catchments and removing valuable farm land from the available diminishing pool. Once good land is converted to trees, it is very difficult to reinstate as food producing land, particularly since timber reserves are held ‘in perpetuity’ under Tasmanian laws.

We have raised these community concerns with the Prime Minister (see attached copy of a letter to PM Rudd which outlines more of the story) and hope that, now that forestry and food production are under the same portfolio, a superior and more rational balance can be achieved in land and water use, particularly in areas with food production potential.

From our independent research, one root cause of the situation appears to be that opportunity costs do not seem to be assessed for forestry related initiatives. No opportunity costs were assessed for either the 2020 Vision program or the Gunns pulp mill, which has led to distorted conclusions biased in favour of forestry that ignore the impacts on everyone else, including impacts on whole industries.

If a mill is to go ahead in Tasmania, our food production industry will need protection from the accelerated conversion of scarce food production land to tree plantations. That conversion is currently supported by major tax incentives that are biasing the competition for our scarce resources of land and water, in favour of pulpwood. The mill siting is at the centre of Tasmania’s food production lands.

It appears that Gunns is hoping to acquire as much farmland as possible to convert to plantations, (each time they purchase land they are rewarded with about $3,200 per ha from the taxpayer and as much again from some ‘investor’). The tax incentives are clearly driving the growth of the tree plantation estate, and since there are no caps, or any regulation to control the program, other industries that rely on the scarce resources of land and water in Tasmania are under threat. Forestry is the beneficiary and is lobbying hard to retain their situation.

About 5% of our useful farmland is being converted to trees each year (roughly 25,000 ha) although the State government doesn’t report this. Given that agriculture is bringing in about $2.5 billion each year, and given that it employs about 25,000 people directly and indirectly, each time such a reduction occurs we take a serious economic and employment hit. Logging does NOT compensate for these losses.

Our estimates indicate that food production earns about $2,000 per ha at the farm gate (about 450,000 ha available, only 86,000 ha of which is Class 1 –3 and suitable for vegetables). This translates out to about $5,600 per ha per year when all downstream processing is included. With the loss of much of the mainland’s food production capacities due to drought, the taxpayer funded threat to Tasmania’s food production potential makes no sense whatever, except for the pulpwood industry. The pulpwood industry will only return about $1,600 per ha per year including downstream processing because they only get a crop about once each 15 years. Those monies do not flow through rural communities, instead they are funnelled directly to logging companies and mainland investors. This slow rate of return is already crippling the cash flow of rural communities and creating huge rural disquiet.

The threat is now amplified by the approval of Gunns pulp mill, which will require well over 400,000 ha of plantation estate to service the mill alone, once the native forest is depleted. The sheer scale of the mill (one of the world’s largest) will deliver control of our best land and water resources to Gunns.

Tasmania has done no checking of the impacts of the mill, or of a disaster or series of errors at the mill (Gunns has never done this before) on the fishing industry. Lennon ‘outsourced’ the Tasmanian approval decision to a Swedish pulp mill supplier. The only checking done was by Turnbull’s limited process.

The impacts of supplying the mill with wood have always been left entirely from all consideration, with Gunns declaring them not relevant. Our analysis shows those impacts to encompass about 70% of the total impacts that have been excluded. Those impacts include extreme water use as each hectare of tree plantation takes an average of 2 Ml/ha/yr of water above agricultural uses. With over 200,000 ha of plantations already, this totals over 400 Gl per year already, equal to all food irrigation uses in Tasmania. Forestry neither accounts for, nor pays for, that water use, in fact Gunns is reportedly only being charged about $25 per Ml for water for mill use when the residents are paying over $600 per Ml for treated water, while irrigators are paying about $130 Ml for untreated.

The pulpwood industry is able to easily out-lobby agriculture who are represented by farming organisations that have strong links to the forestry industry. They also represent lots of small distributed producers unlike forestry’s massive corporates and consequently field a lot less money, less focus, less savvy and less political ‘clout’.

The evidence shows the community that food production is under direct threat from government sponsored forestry programs in Tasmania. I urge you to read the relevant sections of the letter to Mr Rudd as attached.

I trust that you find the materials useful and informative.

We can answer queries and supply further information should you require it.

Sincerely,

The Directors, A Better Australia