Our food bowl won't be owned much longer by Australians and as these nations and corporations produce vast quantities of meat and produce for their own countries - it will deplete our own food supply and export market.
A couple of weeks ago Australia's biggest beef cattle company, AAco sold a $67.4 million stake to one of Osama Bin Laden's brothers who owns a foodstuffs conglomerate. They have plans to keep 70,000 head of sheep for live export - a trade which should have been stopped years ago.
The Coalition and Labor are both responsible for allowing this to happen with the full approval of the IMF and the current government appears to welcome this takeover by foreign nations. Our politicians only care about a quick buck and aren't in the least concerned about Australia's ability to feed future generations who will be at the mercy of the Arabs and the Chinese.
HASAN Mohammad Bin Laden, one of Osama's brothers, is playing Farmer Joe.
The head of the Middle-East Foodstuff Consortium is on a spending spree, targeting millions of hectares of farmland around the world to use as Saudi Arabia's "rice barn".
And next on his hit list is Australia.
Saudi Arabia, along with Abu Dhabi and Kuwait, want to buy more than $1 billion worth of Aussie farmland in a 21st century land grab; a global game of Squatter. Their mission is to own Australian cropping land to feed their own people. The big legal question is: Who owns what if there is a global food crisis?
GRAIN, an international sustainable-agriculture group, has identified at least five global firms - acting on behalf of their governments - who are trying to buy or lease Australian farms.
They are China's Suntime International Techno-Economic Co-operation Group, India's Ministry of External Affairs, Abu Dhabi's Al Qudra Holding, the Qatar Company for Meat and Livestock Trading (Mawashi) and the Bahraini company TRAFCO.
Some Australian farmers, already concerned about the Chinese raid on our coal and oil supplies, believe the Department of Primary Industries is selling them out. They're still reeling from the sale of the rights to a 550 million-tonne mine, which the Shenhua Energy Company is gouging from agricultural land near Gunnedah in north-west NSW.
"We're very much an extinguishing breed, the family farmer," Liverpool Plains farmer Tim Duddy said.
The National Farmers Federation, far from protecting the man on the land, supports the foreign raids, citing "anecdotal evidence" of Chinese and Middle Eastern corporations taking majority shareholdings in local farms.
http://www.2ue.com.au/blogs/2ue-blog/ju ... 18s7p.html
