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Introduction

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Wheat Marketing in Transition

Part of the book series: Environment & Policy ((ENPO,volume 53))

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Abstract

There is something about wheat. Of all the basic foodstuffs, this grain seems to arouse the most passion and attract the greatest attention of governments. Works on the wheat industry frequently cite Socrates’ observation that ‘Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problem of wheat’ (see for example Dunsdorfs 1956: 263; Morriss 1987: 1). The market for grain has also been ranked with oil cartels and financial markets as a source of power and influence (Morgan 1979: 228). This book describes how one government, that of Australia, has dealt with the ‘problem of wheat’. In so doing it tracks the life and death of collective wheat marketing as an institution, and its organisational manifestation in the form of the Australian Wheat Board which was central to Australian wheat marketing for nearly 60 years. The manner in which the Board continued successfully to reproduce itself over time provides a neat example of how competing values play out in the policy process and how institutions having been established to further one set of values can effectively exclude other values from policy consideration.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    One of the confusions surrounding much media reporting about the Oil-for-Food Program was that the entity which engaged in sanctions-busting behaviour was a private company, AWB Limited, not its predecessor, the statutory Australian Wheat Board. In order to avoid perpetuating that confusion, this book uses ‘the Australian Wheat Board’ or ‘the Wheat Board’ when referring to the statutory arrangement and ‘AWB Limited’ when referring to the privatised body. Avoiding the use of the acronym ‘AWB’ for the statutory body may be cumbersome in places but it is considered essential to making the clear distinction between the government body and the private company.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Business and Government, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia

    Prof. Linda Courtenay Botterill

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  1. Prof. Linda Courtenay Botterill
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Correspondence to Linda Courtenay Botterill .

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Botterill, L.C. (2012). Introduction. In: Wheat Marketing in Transition. Environment & Policy, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2804-2_1

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