Ban Milk Now!!!!!
Recently, I've bee getting a bit of shit for being in the cotton industry. Actually, it isn't just recently, it's been happening for years, but lately it's been stepped up a few gears.Check this out for starters.
What started as a mild comment in reply to a post on a very funny site degenerated very shortly into an abuse fest by someone called Karol who seems to think that anybody who grows cotton should be sodomised, or something. This Uber-Hippy made a series of claims about cotton and what he sees as the panacea to the world's ills - hemp. When challenged to cite his sources for these claims, the Uber-Hippy remained silent, which leads me to believe that his source was some unwashed bead-wearer who bludged a cup of 'free-range' dandelion tea from him to wash down the wholemeal lentil burger he ate during a break in the "knit your own goat" talk at the "Back To Gondwana 2: Peace, Love and Vegetable Rights" festival at Nimbin, incorporating the "Circumventing Centrelink" seminar. Not that I have anything against Hemp; some of my favourite garments are hemp. Really.
As an aside, the dairy industry in Australia uses 250%(roughly) the amount of water that the cotton industry does, for a return of less than 25% the amount per megalitre. At least, it did in 1996-97, the last year that I have figures for. Christ knows what the returns are for the poor bastards after de-regulation. Coupled with the fact that the Australian cotton industry is the most efficient of the major producers in the world, in terms of bales/ha and bales/meg (Israel beats us on both counts - an amazing feat considering what they have to work with - but it is a tiny industry by world standards) and the 'Planet Raper' lobby group loses credibility. Unless you work for the ABC.
Now, usually I have a fair bit of time for the ABC radio mob, especially when you compare them with the opposition, but this morning Tony Eastley gave us a real hatchet job on the A.M. program. After interviewing a few people from around the Menindee/Wilacannia region of the Darling Basin and giving them all a sympathetic "There, there" hearing he interviewed John Grabbe, the manager of Cubbie Station, the world's biggest cotton irrigation development. Before I go on, I must mention that nobody Eastley interviewed had the knives out for Cubbie or anybody else. It was mentioned but not complained about.
Eastley had different ideas, though, repeatedly cutting Grabbe short when he was answering and highlighting the fact that while people in NSW were short of water Cubbie was "holding it up" in their storages "the size of Sydney Harbour" At no stage did Eastley mention that last year, out of 35,000 acres available for cotton on Cubbie, they grew none. 0. Nil. Zilch. Nor was there any mention of the fact that, in terms of water quantity per acre, Cubbie doesn't hold any more water than any other well designed cotton farm.
Much was made of the fact that NSW had halted further irrigation development on the Murray- Darling Basin in 1993, whereas QLD didn't. No mention was made of the fact that there ain't hardly nowhere left to develop in NSW anyway, instead it was yet another case of "We're finished, so you've got to stop, too."
It's not hard to tell what market Eastley was aiming at - the inner Sydney denim-wearing cotton - haters.
It's late, I'm tired, I'll rant some more another time.
What started as a mild comment in reply to a post on a very funny site degenerated very shortly into an abuse fest by someone called Karol who seems to think that anybody who grows cotton should be sodomised, or something. This Uber-Hippy made a series of claims about cotton and what he sees as the panacea to the world's ills - hemp. When challenged to cite his sources for these claims, the Uber-Hippy remained silent, which leads me to believe that his source was some unwashed bead-wearer who bludged a cup of 'free-range' dandelion tea from him to wash down the wholemeal lentil burger he ate during a break in the "knit your own goat" talk at the "Back To Gondwana 2: Peace, Love and Vegetable Rights" festival at Nimbin, incorporating the "Circumventing Centrelink" seminar. Not that I have anything against Hemp; some of my favourite garments are hemp. Really.
As an aside, the dairy industry in Australia uses 250%(roughly) the amount of water that the cotton industry does, for a return of less than 25% the amount per megalitre. At least, it did in 1996-97, the last year that I have figures for. Christ knows what the returns are for the poor bastards after de-regulation. Coupled with the fact that the Australian cotton industry is the most efficient of the major producers in the world, in terms of bales/ha and bales/meg (Israel beats us on both counts - an amazing feat considering what they have to work with - but it is a tiny industry by world standards) and the 'Planet Raper' lobby group loses credibility. Unless you work for the ABC.
Now, usually I have a fair bit of time for the ABC radio mob, especially when you compare them with the opposition, but this morning Tony Eastley gave us a real hatchet job on the A.M. program. After interviewing a few people from around the Menindee/Wilacannia region of the Darling Basin and giving them all a sympathetic "There, there" hearing he interviewed John Grabbe, the manager of Cubbie Station, the world's biggest cotton irrigation development. Before I go on, I must mention that nobody Eastley interviewed had the knives out for Cubbie or anybody else. It was mentioned but not complained about.
Eastley had different ideas, though, repeatedly cutting Grabbe short when he was answering and highlighting the fact that while people in NSW were short of water Cubbie was "holding it up" in their storages "the size of Sydney Harbour" At no stage did Eastley mention that last year, out of 35,000 acres available for cotton on Cubbie, they grew none. 0. Nil. Zilch. Nor was there any mention of the fact that, in terms of water quantity per acre, Cubbie doesn't hold any more water than any other well designed cotton farm.
Much was made of the fact that NSW had halted further irrigation development on the Murray- Darling Basin in 1993, whereas QLD didn't. No mention was made of the fact that there ain't hardly nowhere left to develop in NSW anyway, instead it was yet another case of "We're finished, so you've got to stop, too."
It's not hard to tell what market Eastley was aiming at - the inner Sydney denim-wearing cotton - haters.
It's late, I'm tired, I'll rant some more another time.
posted by Dirk at 5:57 pm
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