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Letters to the Editor:

Australian agriculture needs protection

The collapse of the WTO round in Canczn may inject a sense of realism 
into thinking about Australian agriculture policy. While Australia should 
continue to argue for reductions in subsidies and lowering of tariffs in 
the US and the EU, for many good reasons, the level playing field simply 
isn't happening at all.

That goal of at least 30 years standing remains totally illusive. Given 
that this is the reality should Australians allow their generally efficient 
farming sector to be wiped out further through tariff reductions and only 
spasmodic assistance, mostly to combat droughts or floods?

Seems to me we should match the subsidy levels applied elsewhere, raise the 
tariffs where required and get on with rebuilding agriculture and boosting 
rural exports.

Last year 45,000 jobs were lost in the rural sector. In an already highly 
urbanised society this doesn't make sense.

Some say we don't have that option. Please explain! Otherwise change tack

The proposed FTA with the US, not wanted by American farmers anyway, could 
carry a much higher price for Australia than subsidies.

Klaas Woldring
Pearl Beach, NSW

George Monbiot, one of the great minds assembled here a few short weeks 
ago, wrote a piece that predicted the outcome of the WTO, as you read 
today. In a timely article (The Guardian Sept 3) he compares the 
economic divide between the haves and the have nothings today with the 
strangely similar divide in France, a few years before the Revolution.

There are, he says, no reliable wealth statistics from that time, but the 
disparities are unlikely to have been greater than they are today.

The wealthiest five per cent of the world's people now earn 114 times as 
much as the poorest five per cent. Pause and think.

He then puts it in another way: the 500 richest people on earth now own 
$1.54 trillion — more than the entire gross domestic product of Africa, or 
the combined annual incomes of the poorest half of humanity.

From such obscenities militants, insurgents, revolutionaries aka 
"terrorists" are created. And our leaders (Bush, Blair, Howard) persist in 
pursuing the old failed policies, hoping we'll believe that they have not 
done irreparable damage to the cause of establishing the just systems 
needed to remove the grinding poverty, the despair and the "terror".

Peter Clancy