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Mealtime in Australia has become an international smorgasboard of imported goods, and for some, it's destroying rural Australia.
After fighting for his life as a pilot in WWII, Dudley Marrows settled in Mildura, planting 270 hectares of citrus orchards. Little did he realise that 60 years later he would be battling against free trade and the cheap foreign imports the policy allows.
"I feel we've been deserted," says Dudley Marrows. "Fighting to keep going I lost $100,000 for two years running."
Dudley has been fighting against a tide of Brazilian OJ concentrate flooding into Australia.
As there are no tariffs or import duties on most foods, it makes it easy for
Brazil to flood the market.
The price for a litre of OJ concentrate has dropped from 60 cents a litre to just 20 cents.
"It came as a dramatic surprise to us really, we weren't at all ready for it, we protested as strongly as ever we could," says Dudley.
The protesting fell on deaf ears within government.
"I was losing money heavily. At the end of the day I had to make a tragic decision and that was to let the trees die and retire," says Dudley.
"It's a disappointment, it's an injustice."
The importation of currants from Greece has also had an impact.
Four years ago in Victoria's Sunraysia district farmers grew 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes a year. Today, they�re lucky to grow 10,000 tonnes between them.
For fourth generation farmer Henry Tankard, moving over and letting his vines die was not part of his retirement plan. At 72 he'd spent most of his life tending to them, but now they're dead: after the price of currants dropped from $2000 a tonne to $1300 in just two years.
"It's cruel in a sense, it's not that they weren't viable from a productivity sense, they probably had a life span of 60 to 80 years if they were nurtured properly, but that's the end, because of those forces which I cannot control."
Like Henry, Keith Sharman had to destroy his currant vines.
"It was terrible for us because our vineyards at the time, our oldest vines
were about seven to eight years old, we'd only spent
three years in full
production to have to rip it all out and transfer to other cropping. It was
devastating."
Complicating the situation is the fact that Greek farmers are being paid subsidies from the European Economic Union to grow the currants.
Bill McClumpha is the Victorian Farmers Federation spokesperson for the district.
"The Greeks, they're given a $5000 per hectare grant from the government which means that their cost of production, which is probably similar to ours, ends up being much much lower. So they can virtually give the product away and flood our markets. The Greek government and the EEC pay those growers to put us out of business."
Bill says Australia's free trade policy has to change.
"At the moment the onus is on the farmers and industry to prove to Australian
Customs that a dump has occurred. Dumping happens if the import is sold here at
below the domestic price, or if it's causing material damage to our own
industries."
"We don't have effective anti-dumping legislation."
"Unlike other nations, we won't protect our own growers or industries because we want to take a hardline ideological stance and the growers and the industries are just collateral damage," says Bill.
"Free trade is a dirty word out here. Twenty years ago it was a policy
heralded as visionary by the then labor government, and we were promised all
Western countries would follow Australia's lead. Well two decades later that
simply hasn't happened. We're still the only country that lets food products
come in for free. The result? Well these dead vines are symbolic of how the
policy has decimated the livelihood of thousands of Aussie farmers."
"If you can buy a can of tomatoes at the supermarket for 48 cents you can be sure it's dumped, its below the cost of production, it can't be produced for that," says Bill.
Tomato growers have lost out to imported Italian tinned tomatoes selling at half the price. Again Italian farmers were given subsidies.
Producers of tinned tomatoes SPC Ardmona has spent $300,000 funding a legal investigation to prove the dumping to Australian Customs, the government authority in charge of policing problem.
The federal Minister for Customs, Bob Debus, refused an interview with Today Tonight, blaming the customs investigation into the Greek currant dumping.
His office referred Today Tonight to Chris Bowen, the Minister for Competition Policy. Again Today Tonight was refused an interview, only to be re-directed to Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Industry.
Senator Carr's office also declined, saying the subject was a matter for Minister for Customs, Bob Debus.