Canberra, Friday 15 February 2002

Government farm poverty policy 'failing': study

Government policy responses to farm poverty have failed to address the problem as a welfare issue and have been framed in terms of economic objectives, often encouraging farmers to leave the land, an academic from The Australian National University said.

Linda Botterill, from the ANU School of Social Sciences, said despite a number of farmers in Australia living in poverty, they could not receive welfare benefits from the Government unless they were willing to leave their farm.

“I examined the government responses to farm poverty from 1989 to 1998 and I basically came to the conclusion that there were no major changes to the policy approaches implemented during that time,” she said. “The responses were always framed in terms of achieving structural adjustment in the farm sector so, instead of regarding inadequate farm incomes as a welfare problem, they were seen as an adjustment problem.”

Ms Botterill said that this structural adjustment approach has included provisions aimed at encouraging non-productive farmers to leave the land to free up the resources for more efficient farmers.

She said this response failed to acknowledge that people farmed for a range of reasons including lifestyle and family tradition and that offering economic incentives to leave may not be effective.

“There is a pocket of farmers who are prepared to stay on the farm even if they are in poverty, so that then raises the question about whether the Australian community is prepared to accept that we have Australians living in poverty or whether we should have a welfare system for farmers,” she said.
Ms Botterill said a series of programs with various names had been initiated over the past 11 years but were all based on the same idea.

“To date the policies have only offered benefits to low-income farmers for a certain length of time with many of the schemes linking income support to farm exit. ” she said.

“My criticism of this process is that they have not taken into consideration the values that keep farmers on the land, other than the economic considerations. At the end of the day they are making policy that tries to influence people’s behaviour and if you are trying to do that, you have to be aware of what the influences are which drive that behaviour.

“If a farmer farms for the love of it, offering them money to leave is not going to work.”

Ms Botterill said that farm poverty in Australia had not been measured thoroughly, but anecdotal evidence and research suggested that inadequate incomes for farmers had been a problem in this country for decades.

“Getting an idea of the average farmer income is difficult because of the variables involved. We really do not know how many farmers are living in poverty.

Ms Botterill said measuring how much poverty exists is the first step to alleviating this problem.

“If there are only a small number of affected farmers, we might be able to tweak the existing social security system to catch that handful. However, if there are thousands of them, we may need an actual rethink of our welfare programs for low income farmer families,” she said.

She said that, to date, there had not been an opportunity within the policy process to acknowledge the welfare problem in farming. She said this has largely been because, regardless of their income, farmers were often asset rich, making it impossible for them to receive welfare benefits.

“One approach to remedy this situation for farmers may be to introduce a separate welfare system for them,” she said.

For more information contact: Linda Botterill (02) 6125 5534 or 0419 514 578;
Genevieve Turville, ANU Public Affairs, (02) 6125 5575 or 0416 249 245

18/2002

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Last Modified Tue, July 16, 2002