• by IPS Correspondents (sydney)
• Friday, November 25, 1994
• Inter Press Service

SYDNEY, Nov 25 (IPS) - Drought-stricken Australia's agricultural sector is getting blows from all corners, deepening the financial and social crisis facing the country's rural communities.

The dry spell has now entered its fourth year in Australia, and the mood among the nation's farmers is dark. Indeed, the annual winter harvest has just begun, but wheat industry sources say exports this year will be less than half of last year.

Officials in Canberra had not even finished figuring out how to thwart an apparent attempt of the United States to horn in on the markets vacated by Australian wheat producers when yet another crisis hit.

Last week, the United States and other major beef markets in Asia suspended sales of Australian beef because of a contamination scare that was traced to farmers resorting to chemical-loaded pellets of cotton leaves in the midst of a shortage of feed.

"It was good protein, the cattle liked it and it was clean to use," says cattle farmer Brian Lewis in northern New South Wales.

But what he and at least 52 other farmers in the area did not know was that the leaves were contaminated with chlorfluazuron, a chemical used to control caterpillars in cotton plants. Chlorfluazuron is not a toxic substance, but it is not permissible in beef fat in quantities greater than one part per million.

Now, Lewis's farm and that of many of his neighbours are under quarantine. Until restrictions are lifted, they have to spend more than four dollars per cattle head a week when they should have already been selling the animals this time of the year.

Ironically, the crisis was triggered by a tip from Australia's own Meat and Livestock Corp (AMLC), which had found traces of the chemical in some of the exports they tested before shipping abroad.

Australia has been painstakingly promoting itself as a provider of 'green foods'. Thus, the beef industry took the precaution of warning overseas buyers about the possible contamination, thinking they would take the advisory as proof of the efficiency of Australia's food testing procedures.

Instead, the United States immediately put all incoming Australian beef shipments under quarantine and Japan banned Australian beef from school lunch menus and their leading department store chains yanked the product off their shelves.

South Korea has done the same, and so have Canada, Taiwan and Mexico, throwing Australia's 3.57 billion dollar-a-year beef export industry into a turmoil.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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