Jobs are being lost wholesale across the nation's surviving manufacturing industries and there seems to be little joy in sight for Australian manufacturing, with the Aussie dollar still staying well above levels where exporters would like to see it to allow us to be more competitive on the global stage.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
In the midst of this, submissions have just closed for the Commonwealth's 'Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper'.
The Australian government is looking to boost agriculture's productivity and profitability so this is the first step in a major consultation process in a bid to garner all the best and brightest ideas on how to help achieve those ends.
The White Paper will 'drive the long term agricultural policies of the government' and is looking for innovative ways to do this.
Macquarie 2100 had made a lengthy submission outlining the potential of the industrial hemp industry, a crop which was the world's largest traded commodity up until the end of the 19th Century.
M2100 wanted to make sure the people making the decisions had access to all the latest information on how so many countries across the world are now looking to re-establish industrial hemp to create thousands of jobs and boost the economies of their farm and regional sectors.
In the late 1990s a group of local farmers experimented with industrial hemp crops and were hoping to set up a local processing plant at Narromine which would initially employ 40 people.
These days that would equate to more than $2m being pumped into the town's economy each year just in wages alone, notto mention inputs and all the services such an operationwould require from other local business, and that was just the start.
The M2100 case to the Commonwealth is that if this industry could return far better farm gate profits and create thousands of jobs in small communities, along with improving the carbon in our soils, why shouldn't it be the government's highest priority.
Imagine industrial hemp processing plants the size of Fletcher International in the small towns across the nation's irrigated valleys and the wealth thatcould create, the jobs that would flow.
M2100 has asked for a trial in the lower valley to nuture and establish a viable industrial hemp industry, calling for tax incentives to attract big business to take the risk and set up a plant to produce paper products.
With an acre of hemp grown in a single 100-day season producing as much paper product as four acres of trees over a 20-year period, surely our 21st Century expertise should be able to make this happen.