Word: rice
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...land is lunar-like now," says Ian Brunt, who's on 120 hectares near the New South Wales town of Finley and has been rice farming for 32 years. "The tractor's throwing up clouds of dust." Les Gordon recalls the disenchantment among farmers in 1982 when state authorities limited farmers to 60% of their normal water allowance. Now, "I would kill for a 60% allocation," says Gordon, who still farms with his father, Henry. "Dad planted his first rice crop in 1949. No one around here has seen conditions like this before...
...This year's meager Australian rice harvest has sent shockwaves through the local industry and beyond. With almost nothing to process, the grower-owned company SunRice announced late last year that it was mothballing its Deniliquin rice mill, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, as well as its Coleambally mill, making 180 jobs redundant. Though no Australian farming family relies purely on rice for its income, many have laid off workers, sold machinery and increased their debt in response to recent shortfalls...
...normal year, Australia exports 85% of its rice production as branded product to some 70 markets through Asia, the Middle East, the South Pacific and other destinations. So it is that although Australian rice represents only 0.2% of world rice production, it accounts for more than 4% of the global rice trade - enough to feed 40 million people one meal a day for a year...
...This year's near wipeout has thrown the market out of kilter. To keep its customers supplied with high-grade rice, SunRice has had to buy it from a number of other countries, then process and pack it overseas. In coming months, not even Australians will be eating much locally grown rice; instead it will be imported from Thailand, India and Pakistan. The SunRice purchases partly explain why rice importers in other parts of the world are having trouble finding supplies...
...among the top three or four wheat exporters in the world, Australia has managed to produce little more than half of its usual 20 million metric tons in each of the past two years. But these setbacks are having a paradoxical effect. Not nearly as thirsty a crop as rice and expensive now on world markets at about $350 a ton, wheat in Australia is attracting new growers. "Some are looking at putting wheat in this year instead of restocking on cattle - because it's cheaper and because they can get a better return," says the Australian Wheat Board...