In ‘Australian Agriculture: the real story’, Ben Rees discusses the historic development and application of agricultural policy.
‘Five decades of economies of scale agricultural policy by any common sense measure has failed. The core problem is conflict between two Laws in economics. The first law forms supply and demand theory in contemporary economic models and assumes constant returns to scale. This conflicts with a second well known Law that identifies agriculture as operating under declining returns to scale. Conflict between these two laws has resulted in long term policy failure, unmanageable debt levels, bank foreclosures insolvencies, suicides; and, damaged the social fabric in rural Australia. Political will is required for effective policy change and the restructure of rural industries.’
- Australian Agriculture: the real story »
- Cultivating a nation: why the mythos of the Australian farmer is problematic »
- The future of agriculture: why unis must prepare students to secure both our food and our planet »
In ‘Rural Queensland: A Graphical Snapshot’, Rees provides graphs that provide an empirical indicator analysis of economic performance across population, employment, income and income distribution. (This paper is Appendix A from the main paper above).