Farmers are being gouged by those looking to make money off the back of the drought, says Federal Member for Calare Andrew Gee.
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Mr Gee is calling for a shake up in the grain industry as the east coast moves closer to running out of feed for stock. There had been some massive buys in the market recently, Mr Gee said, and it was being stockpiled in expectation of the price increasing.
The result is a lack of grain available for farmers in need.
To get the grain from Western Australia, which has had a bumper harvest, to the Central West, Mr Gee is pushing for the federal government to locate and ship grain via train or boat.
“It's not a freight subsidy but it is an intervention in terms of sourcing the grain and helping get it over here. The farmers are happy to buy it they just don’t want to be gouged and gouged out of business which is what’s going to happen if this continues,” Mr Gee said.
“There are various ways you could do it, you could guarantee the supply over here or guarantee that it would land at a certain price or the government could just buy the grain outright which would probably be the easiest but at the end of the day it’s underwriting the supply of it. At the end of the day you would have the government guarantee a supply.”
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Stephen Kiss, a farmer outside Wellington, said he was going through about 20 tonnes of feed per week for his stock. The sheep were eating about one kilogram of feed per day, he said.
At the moment, Mr Kiss said it had cost him $20 per sheep for a $150 animal. Three more months of feed and the sheep would have cost $50 per head.
However, Mr Kiss said the attitude around the region was pretty positive.
“The price of sheep and wool is still great but there’s a lot of properties out there who probably could have managed it a bit better and I’m one of those too, I could have managed this a lot better than I have. I should have de-stocked in hindsight but I didn’t and this is where we are now,” he said.
But it was frustrating seeing others use the rising costs to their advantage, he said.
“We were buying grain under $400 [per tonne] last week and now it’s up near $500. It’s gone up 25, 30 per cent in the last week,” Mr Kiss said.
“I don’t mind people making money out of it but there are people out there who are now gouging out of it.”
CRT Wellington’s Michael White said Mr Gee’s plan would give confidence to farmers.
“I think some of the fear is that is the government gets involved they’ll want to step back in and control the grain industry which is not what Andrew is on about. This is a one off and we must have surety of grain. And hay for that matter which is just as important,” he said.
Mr White said he had already seen people asking up to $500 per tonne for grain.
Mr Gee said farmers didn’t want free grain, just a guarantee of supply at a fair price.
“Farmers are being taken advantage of, they’re being gouged and people are profiting off the misery and the struggle of farmers which is just un-Australian,” he said.
The next step is for the MP to take the idea to Parliament for support.
“You’ve got to remember most MPs are not in the country, they’re in the city and you’ve got to put it to them and tell them how dire it is. That’s what the framers here are asking me to do and by crickey I’m going to have a crack at it,” Mr Gee said.
“People are managing as best they can and people are working very hard to get through it but everyone is very worried about what the future holds and in the absence of rain we’re just going to have to keep ramping up the support and getting the support to where it’s needed.”
Mr Gee said he hoped even by raising the possibility of the government getting involved in the east coast grain market it would “shake a bit of that grain out” of the people who were sitting on it.
It was an issue that needed to be dealt with as soon as possible, he said.
