Foreign interests including state-owned companies from China and the Middle East are increasingly looking to Australia to secure their food production by purchasing key agricultural assets.
The sale of agricultural land is exempt under Foreign Investment Review Board regulations and the FIRB’s attention is usually triggered only by the sale of companies whose assets exceed a $231 million threshold.
In recent years, and especially since the global food shortage in 2008, China, South Korea, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have all been engaged in massive agricultural purchases around the world and in Australia
In a new book, The Coming Famine, by University of California Press and the CSIRO, Australian science writer Julian Cribb raises major concerns about how the world will feed itself.
"Between now and the 2060s, the human population is going to grow to about 11.4 billion people... So basically the world has to find twice as much food as it is producing today."
All the resources needed to produce that extra food will be in increasingly short supply, including arable land, water, fertilisers and oil.
While the impact of extreme weather has caused immediate food shortages, Australia also needs to focus on its sale of arable land and water to foreign companies and governments.
If more widespread food shortages continue, food produced and grown in Australia will be transferred to countries that are buying up Australian land, rather than being sold on world markets, says Milne, who points to the ongoing land grab by China, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
"The world changed dramatically when countries realised it didn't matter how much money they had – if other nations decided to withhold the export of food, they would have a problem," she points out. "Nations started buying production land and water elsewhere in the world to feed their own people."
More than $9 billion of prized agricultural assets have been sold to offshore interests in the past two years alone.
And it's not just our land thats vanishing under our very noses, our water is taking the same path!
Australian businessman Richard Lourey will climb aboard a plane bound for Hong Kong to sell our water to the world. Not water in bottles. Farm water. He wants to bag $100 million from overseas investors in Asia, Europe and North America to buy up permanent water rights along the Murray-Darling Basin, one of the longest river systems in the world. He plans to lease it back annually to those who want it - and can afford to pay.
Lourey is one of the new breed of global investors who see fresh water as business - big business.
Another is John Dickerson, a former CIA analyst in San Diego, who set up one of the first funds in the world dedicated to acquiring water rights.
$20 million worth of entitlements bought by the US-owned Summit Global Management through an Australian subsidiary;
An estimated $130 million worth of water bought by Olam International of Singapore in a deal involving the purchase of almond groves in northern Victoria
More than $30 million worth of rights in western NSW held by Tandou which has substantial overseas ownership.
Meanwhile, the chief executive of the NSW Irrigators Council, Andrew Gregson, has revealed that merchant banks have approached the organisation for advice on how European investors can pour hundreds of millions of dollars more into Australian water.
Australia has spawned the most advanced water market in the world, with more than $3 billion worth of rights changing hands last year.
In short,Aussies are in danger of becoming servants, not masters, of their own food and water resources.
Write to every Minister, both sides of the house, let them know we want security for our children and the generations that will follow. In one of the driest countries in the world we don't have a lot of good farming land or water to give away!
Further references can be found
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