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Framing Northern Australian Agriculture’s Future

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Abstract

This chapter frames Northern Australia’s possible agricultural future and considers the specific relevance of planet and people matters to the past, present and future of individuals involved in Northern Australian Agriculture. As human populations have grown and civilisations developed, land use planning has emerged as a profession to facilitate a negotiated outcome between conflicting parties. While regional land use planning has not developed to the level of complexity of urban planning, its focus in most countries remains on the institutional processes to meet “public” interest and “utopian” ideals, of which sustainable development is the latest manifestation. Despite widespread adoption of neo-liberal principles by governments in the later decades of the twentieth century, and the commensurate improvement in living standards attributed to them, the free market has not delivered an optimal simultaneous solution for allocating resources, maximising consumer welfare, stabilising foreign trade, and reducing agricultural price instability. Governments are still called upon to intervene in the market and stimulate, regulate, or control economic forces, particularly when policy focus moves from direct production issues into less agreed arenas such as environmental management. Some of these policies emphasise the willingness of the middle-class consumer to pay a little extra for quality, a force that encourages product differentiation and thereby feeds investment in both production and marketing of new goods. This latter role has become more pronounced with the expansion of global trade, and new trade theories have evolved to explain why most trade expansion has been occurring at the extensive margin – that is, through the expansion of new goods rather than greater trade of existing products.

It may be useful to think of places, not as areas on maps, but as constantly shifting articulations of social relations through time...the identity of places … is always in that sense, temporary, uncertain and in process.

Massey (1995)

Keith Noble has contributed more to this chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Situations and events in the natural world that lead to good or poor harvests.

  2. 2.

    The arrangements and occurrences among people that determine the distribution of costs and benefits that flow from the operation of the food system.

  3. 3.

    There are 56 Regional NRM bodies across Australia – see http://nrmregionsaustralia.com.au/regional-nrm/.

  4. 4.

    An American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history, and theory and the complexity of stabilisation policy, in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom.

  5. 5.

    Othello, for example, is a tragedy that proceeds from misunderstandings and miscommunication.

  6. 6.

    There exists a view within the pastoral industry that the media debate was also weak intellectually, insofar as there was only a limited effort to research ramifications of the decision or to present an industry perspective.

  7. 7.

    Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

  8. 8.

    Aristotle described the tropics as the ‘torrid’ zone, too hot for habitation.

  9. 9.

    On 23 December 1996, the High Court handed down its decision in Wik Peoples v State of Queensland and Others. The decision confirmed that native title rights and interests may exist over land which is or has been subject to a pastoral lease and possibly some other forms of leasehold tenure. The Court held that existing pastoral leases issued prior to 1 January 1994 and the rights granted under them are valid. It also held that the rights of the pastoralist prevail over native title rights and interests to the extent of any inconsistency (ATNS database 2004).

  10. 10.

    A move away from gross domestic product (GDP) as a misleading measure of national success is also advocated, and adoption of a metric more suited to measuring what makes life worthwhile (Costanza et al. 2014).

  11. 11.

    Healthy natural capital assets support and enable agricultural production through the production of ecosystem services. Information about the condition and economic value of natural capital of an agricultural enterprise helps land managers to optimise their operations; helps their customers, investors, lenders and others to use capital allocation decisions to incentivise landholders to maintain or invest in natural capital; and helps policy development.

  12. 12.

    Respectively, the world’s largest providers of transport and accommodation, though neither owns any physical property. Their business models derive from pairing service providers with customers via the Internet. Founded in 2009, by 2014 Uber was ranked 48th most powerful company in America with an estimated worth of $US62.5 billion. Founded in 2007, Airbnb has >1,500,000 listings in 4000 cities and 190 countries.

  13. 13.

    North Australian development has been compared with Halley’s comet: ‘they both come around regularly, though each time they vary in intensity’.

  14. 14.

    The shift from the formal and centralised administration and regulation of populations and territories better known as “government” to the decentralised mode of political management known as “governance”’ (Argent 2011, p. 184).

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Noble, K., Dennis, T., Larkins, S. (2019). Framing Northern Australian Agriculture’s Future. In: Agriculture and Resilience in Australia’s North. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8355-7_4

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