As farmers begin counting the cost of wash-outs in the northern wheat belt and failures in the south, the Federal Government is already ruling out any chance of re-sowing and replanting grants to help get next year's crop in the ground.
Despite repeated acknowledgement that two GFCs – a global financial crisis and global food crisis - are facing agriculture right now, Federal Minister for Agriculture, Tony Burke, has said there were agricultural priorities higher up the ladder than a loan or grants scheme to help farmers get cropping again after millions of tonnes of wheat lie shot and sprung in northern NSW and southern Queensland.
At the same time farmers in southern NSW, Victoria and South Australia have to swallow another failure or near failure, while random storms in Western Australia have also downgraded receivals.
Both scenarios are compounded by the near collapse in the feed-grain market and growing difficulties finding contractors to get the last of the crop harvested.
But Mr Burke said he would not be considering any cases for re-sowing grants at this stage.
"In terms of where we can best use the funds available for agriculture in a way to promote productivity and help people through difficult times, re-sowing grants - while there are good and decent arguments put forward for them – other priorities for where we can put government funds have consistently come out in front," he said.
"I'm not there bagging them but there are other areas of engagement for funds which I think have a more lasting significance for the sector as a whole."
Mr Burke did concede that wheat farmers had not been spared from any fallout of the global financial crisis, and blamed the collapse of US finance giant Lehman Brothers as having "an extraordinary impact" on the declining wheat market.
"The financial crisis has hit us in ways that, in hindsight now, make a level of logical sense but I don't think too many people predicted," Mr Burke said.
"Part of what has happened in international markets for many years now is the importance of the soft commodities market and the growth and speculation within those markets.
"The mere absence of Lehman Brothers – the mere absence of one player in that speculation on grain – of itself had an extraordinary impact in beginning the decline in what had been a sharp acceleration in the global grain price and the global wheat price."
Mr Burke said just taking one speculator out of the equation was the beginning of a very sharp trend.
He said while a lower dollar had been some help to farmers, farmers hadn't been fully insulated from the economic fallout.
"They (graingrowers) are going through the challenge now of selling at a lower price compared to what would have been, earlier in the year," Mr Burke said.
"It's also the same crop where they had to deal with record input prices when they were putting it together.
"With all the uncertainty that putting a crop together ever has, who would have thought for so many people in the north that this year's harvest would have come to an end for some producers – not because of drought, but because of rain and the impact of those storms in very recent times."
Mr Burke said the global financial crisis meant there would also be the ongoing impact on the availability of credit and "that has an impact to some extent on Australian producers seeking credit for themselves".
"Also, perhaps more significantly, it affects whether the purchasers of our produce overseas can raise the capital to be able to continue with large-scale purchases.
"All of those issues are still working their way through markets."
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