The Editor

Your front page story (24th December) on the Gunns Limited purchase of Evercreech, whether a fact or otherwise, failed to mention the fundamentally important reason why Gunns can outbid any dairy farming enterprise, no matter how modern or efficient.

Gunns, along with other plantation companies (and/or investors in their wood-lot offerings) are the beneficiaries of a massive tax subsidy from our federal government. Every taxpayer in the country is contributing to a tax scheme that is not available to dairy farmers or any other agricultural enterprise.  It is exclusively available to the plantation industry, which has taken huge tracts of the finest soils in Tasmania out of normal farming activity to be replaced by chemically dependent plantation monocultures of e.nitens and e.globulus that grow very rapidly in these conditions.

At the same time these plantations are consuming massive volumes of water that is, during the summer and autumn, drying out numerous once permanent streams upon which downstream farmers had relied for generations. It is threatening water supplies for Launceston, along with many smaller towns around the state.

I should also mention that the Howard government has further exacerbated the problem of the dairy industry through deregulation, leaving most of the industry at the tender mercies of the giant super-market operators who keep reducing what they pay, at the same time increasing the price to consumers.

These leaves many in the dairy industry between a rock (deregulation) and a hard place (taxpayer subsidies to the likes of Gunns Limited).

Every farmer should be doing some straight talking to their state and federal members.

Paul de Burgh-Day
Lorinna