Agriculture is finally a front page issue in Australia, where it is often ignored.
Unfortunately, it’s prominent in the media because of the Cole Inquiry scandal and farmers are worried about losing the AWB Ltd.’s export monopoly as a result, says the head of an Australian agricultural analysis company.
“This is big in Australia,” Ron Storey, the managing director of Australian Crop Forecasters, told the Canadian Wheat Board’s Grain World conference.
“Agriculture, we get on the front page of Australia’s newspapers perhaps a couple of times a year. This item has dominated news coverage every day for almost five weeks. It’s a feeding frenzy for the media.”
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AWB officials have been accused of paying kickbacks to the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq in return for sales to the formerly pariah state.
Storey said farmers generally feel that AWB is being unfairly demonized for the scandal and don’t want to see the board’s export monopoly lost.
So far, the government has taken pains to make clear that it is not considering scrapping the monopoly in response to the scandal.
“The single desk is not on trial. The company that operates the single desk is. That distinction is something that the farming organizations are really trying to hammer home,” said Storey.
Farmers are worried about the scandal damaging their export markets.
They are already bracing for reforms, however.
“The grower organizations have already come out and said they do not expect things to be the same. The status quo is not likely to be maintained,” said Storey.
While the harsh media spotlight and public scrutiny may make AWB’s plight seem severe, Storey said another Australian company went through a similar scandal and has survived intact.
National Australia Bank went through a “horrendous” scandal a year ago involving foreign exchange trading, but has come through to the other side apparently well.
“It seemed like the end of the world . . . but that company has recovered in an amazingly short period of time, and I think the AWB might need to go through something of the same,” said Storey.
