Author: bigwave

Food manufacturers must target the region’s booming middle classes with innovative processed products, writes Paddy Manning.

You get what you focus on,” said Kraft Food’s Australasian chief, Rebecca Dee-Bradbury, this week, both admonishing and urging her industry peers to seize the opportunity at our doorstep: to be much more than Asia’s paddock when it comes to food supply.

After touring food hubs in Shanghai and Singapore last month, Dee-Bradbury told a business gathering this week, ”it may shock you to understand that Australia is not seen as a high-value food innovator. It is seen as a critical supplier of food commodities.

”The impact on Australia’s largest manufacturing sector, if we become a farm gate supplier, is unthinkable.’

From meat, to dairy, to wine, Australia’s food manufacturing exports are worth up to $17 billion a year, bigger than education and tourism. But the Kraft boss’s warning underlines Australia’s emerging role in the region. The mining boom has already seen Australia become Asia’s quarry – digging dirt out of the ground to fuel China’s future.

Now Australia risks becoming Asia’s farm rather than an exporter and manufacturer of quality foods from trusted quality produce.

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Contract farming has put farmers at a disadvantage as they have to shoulder all the burdens of investment and losses, with lucrative profits going into the pockets of companies engaged in the system, a seminar has been told.

Paisit Panitkul, a law lecturer at Chiang Mai University, said his study showed that contract farming was unfair to farmers as produce was supplied directly to giant agribusiness firms.

This resulted in companies taking advantage of farmers, he told the seminar at Chulalongkorn University yesterday.

Contract farming is a forward agreement between farmers and processing or marketing firms to supply agricultural products, frequently at predetermined and seasonally optimal prices.

Mr Paisit said many small farmers had entered into contract farming in the hope of getting a stable income.

“Contract farming represents a form of disguised exploitation, with companies taking all benefits from selling seeds, livestock, animal feed and farm equipment. Everything generates huge profits for agribusiness firms,” Mr Paisit said.

Food security meant farmers faced exploitation by conditions set by companies, he added. He urged all agencies concerned, including consumers, to push for fair farming contracts.

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Farmers usually use the fruit bags to cover and protect growing fruit from the insecticides that growers spray on fruit trees. Putting pesticides in the bags is illegal.

Agricultural authorities opened the investigation after a newspaper reported that some farmers in Yantai, China’s major apple growing area, were illegally using pesticides in the bags.

Beijing News reported on Monday that individual growers use bags that are contaminated with hazardous chemicals inside.

“We haven’t come to any conclusion yet in the investigation,” said Yang Lijian, director of the pesticide inspection department of the Shandong Agriculture Bureau, when reached by China Daily on Tuesday.

However, Yang said the government pledged to end the use of apple bags contaminated with pesticide-like chemicals if they are found, and to close any workshops that made them.

According to Yang, an investigation of pesticide residue on the ripe fruit from local farmers in September 2011 revealed that some farmers were using bags with pesticide inside.

The Yantai government found in 2010 that some orchard workers applied diluted pesticides inside fruit bags. The pesticides included tuzet and asomate, which are prohibited from such usage.

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