Cane cockies--an unprotected species. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: I agree with your November editorial exposing the nonsense of turning the rivers and drought-proofing Australia. I incline towards its comments regarding the pastoral industry "throwing their money about", having in boom wool times parked my Volkswagen among Mercs, Jags and a Rolls at a rural conference. I also heard of elastic-sides patrolling the lounges of Sydney's Australian Hotel for a month at a time while we honeymooned for a week in a Sydney temperance hotel. (Not that I didn't slip out some nights for a grog.)

Regarding farms, if I and two of my neighbours, each of us with a hundred years of family farm ownership, "are obsessed with their family history on the land" and "work hard but stupid" not one of us have "put out their hands to their brethren in the cities to help them preserve their equity in the farm".

Not that we are altruistic. Federal aid is means-tested and we do not qualify. This demolishes, in our cases, your "There is a basic underlying factor in the periodic convulsions ... this is the chronic under-capitalisation of most farms." The three farms involved have for the last three years been putting upwards of $5 for each tonne of cane grown out of their capital reserves "to preserve their equity in the farm". The loss of profitability is a direct result of cyclones, drought and corrupt world sugar prices largely as a result of EC and US subsidies, and the Brazil sugar subsidy in disguise, the governmental propping up of the real and their massive unrepaid IMF borrowing.

Another potent factor is poor sugar content in our cane varieties, due to the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations' (who yearly "put out their hands" to us for research funding) earlier obsession with breeding high tonnage cane varieties to lift mills to the one million-plus levels and less emphasis on sweeter canes. Sweet canes give the cane grower more of the mill pay but have less advantage to CSR and Bundaberg Sugar. This direction in plant breeding has belatedly been corrected but the flow-through benefits take time.

An ironic twist to your "chronic under-capitalisation of most farms" is the fact that cane cockies who invested outside the sugar industry during good times are still viable, while many who put their capital back into the industry are in strife. (An echo of Doug Anthony's advice "Get bigger or get out" which then, and especially now, achieved an unwelcome dual purpose.)

My stupidity also extended some thirty years ago to being commissioned by UNESCO to write "A Family on a Cane Farm" for educational purposes in South-East Asia, not only a social document but to develop awareness there of Australian cane farming techniques of ...