We did the weekly shop today and so I got a bunch of bananas - currently an essential part of Anya's breakfast. There were five of them and it cost A$15 - or about £2 per banana.
There's a good, bad reason for this. Cyclone Yasi, the massive storm that slammed into north Queensland earlier this year, wiped out 99% of Australia's banana crop. If it had flattened that extra 1%, we wouldn't be able to buy them at any price, because Australia doesn't import fresh bananas. None Nada.
The official reasoning for this is that Australia's environment is so unique and disease-free that the importation of a foreign banana could beget an environmental disaster of cane toad-style proportions. As a result, Australia's quarantine policy - all the airport theatre of contrabanding the apple from your airline meal and pest-spraying your trainers - is wildly popular across the political spectrum.
Clearly there's some law of nature that demands that every rich country come up with some excuse to funnel money to its farm sector. The EU and US do it through subsidies and tax breaks; Australia does it through thinly-disguised protectionism.
The quarantine argument is just bogus: a couple of years back the WTO declared there were no biological grounds for Australia's century-long ban on New Zealand apples; but these cases take years so that ruling didn't exactly open the floodgates. Furthermore, if we really want to preserve Australia's unique ecosystem, about the best thing we could do would be to introduce a series of superbugs that would wipe out all these introduced species that we use to feed ourselves.
The more honest justification is that some hypothetical disease might make agriculture less productive, which will ultimately harm the livelihoods of farmers. I think that risk is exaggerated but it's at least honest about what is going on: this is industrial policy for the farm sector. Keeping out foreign bananas means Australian farmers are better-off, just as keeping out foreign widget-makers would make Australian widget-makers better off.
The question then comes whether this is a price worth paying. Changing the policy would likely impose hefty costs on a small vocal group - banana farmers - while keeping it in place imposes a slight cost on a large, voiceless group: grocery shoppers. Across a whole basket of groceries, this means Australians generally pay too much for fresh fruit and veg, and probably poorer Australians find it particularly difficult; but we're geographically isolated so I'm not sure that the surplus cost is that great.
In principle, this situation is unfair: firstly because farmers are getting a special subsidy, and secondly because it's paid for regressively through people's shopping baskets. But I'm not sure anyone except me and a few like-minded weirdos cares very much, so I can see that if I was a politician I would leave the whole situation well alone. And that, in microcosm, explains a lot about why principled political change is usually so difficult.
I've never heard that the official justification was about a cane toad scale disaster. I always heard the second explanation - that there are agricultural banana diseases that our bananas don't suffer from due to our natural protection as an island.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that protectionism is a factor too but in terms of principles, I'm not sure that I truly believe in free trade when it comes to food. Firstly, food miles are a serious environmental issue. Secondly, I think national food security is extremely important especially with the global food shortages predicted in the coming decades. Australia is right to make sure we retain that capacity and I would like us to stop importing a whole lot of food items and would be happy to pay the price.
It is also a lot different to US agricultural subsidies because that affects the price of food the US is exporting as well as consuming domestically. The fact that Australia doesn't import bananas does not give our banana farmers any advantage when it comes to exports (I don't even think we do export bananas). And Australia is small so the fact that other banana producing nations can't access our domestic market shouldn't make too much difference to them.
Whether or not protectionism comes into it, I understand that banana agricultural diseases ARE real. I heard once that the entire species was nearly wiped out 100 years ago and we eat quite a different variety today and that all the banana varieties are closely related and therefore quite susceptible to disease. So it's really not the same thing as apples.