2 March 2009
DAFF09/91T
Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Tony Burke
Deborah Cameron, Mornings on 702 ABC Sydney
E&OE – PROOF ONLY
Subjects: Fruit and vegetables affected by fires and floods; food prices and availability
DEBORAH CAMERON: Tony Burke loves to cook a good meal using fresh Australian produce. But are we going to see less fruit and vegies in the shops and at higher prices? I wonder what the impact of that hot weather in south-eastern Australia and the floods in Queensland will be. Tony Burke joins me now from Canberra. Good morning, Tony.
TONY BURKE: G’day Deborah.
DEBORAH CAMERON: Thank you very much for your time. Now, first of all the major food wholesalers are saying that vegetable and food prices are expected to rise. As the Minister looking at what the nation’s capacity to produce is, are you also feeling that there will be a rise in prices soon?
TONY BURKE: Well, there’s no doubt there’s some pressure from supply. Exactly how much the pressure on supply is depends, in part, on how picky we’re all going to be over the next few weeks and months. If people are willing to be a bit more lenient with taking fruit and vegies that are a little bit blemished, then there’s a whole lot more supply there.You don’t have the same impact on prices.
And most importantly, the farmers who have been affected, be it by floods in the north or fires in the south, are actually in a much better position to be able to keep their businesses going.
DEBORAH CAMERON: So production’s consistent? It’s just the quality that’s diminished a bit?
TONY BURKE: It depends on the item. There’s just a whole lot of strawberries from the south that have been wiped out. So there will be some definite supply pressure there. No matter whether you want to be fussy or not, there’s just going to be fewer strawberries and there will be some impacts that flow from that.
But things like bananas from the north, they won’t be as bright in colour as they used to be. But the quality will be exactly the same. Leaf vegetables will be a little bit yellow on the edges. But the flavour will be just as good. The apples will be a little bit paler. The pears will have had a little bit of burning on the skin. But the quality of the flavour won’t have changed at all.
People have done a great job in making sure that they give through donations to the appeals for what people have gone through with the fires and with the floods. But to really get communities going again, it’s not just donations, it’s jobs.
And that’s why we’re doing everything we possibly can, right through to whacking some recipes up on the webpage, to try to make sure that if there was ever a time that people were going to be picky about their fruit and vegies, just don’t make it the next few months.
DEBORAH CAMERON: Would you expect that the price of this blemished fruit and vegetables would be cheaper? Or would it be a consistent price, still high, and that’s part of the hard sell for these farmers?
TONY BURKE: At the moment, there hasn’t been a really significant movement on some of the items I’ve just gone through. Some, like strawberries, there has been. Now, we’re talking about a pressure from lack of supply. If people are willing to be a little less picky, then we can really ease those supply pressures. So a lot of this will depend on how consumers react. It really will.
DEBORAH CAMERON: The competition would, I guess, come mainly from imports. We’ve got the New Zealand Prime Minister in Australia at the moment. They have always complained about Australia’s barrier to apple entry, for example. Do you expect there to be a rise in fresh fruit imports in response to market demand?
TONY BURKE: If people decide that they’re not willing to help out the farmers who’ve been affected by the natural disasters of the last few weeks by being a little less picky, then the retailers aren’t going to have a whole lot of choice in terms of what they put on the shelves.
But certainly there’s no change in the Government’s biosecurity rules out of this. So it’s not like we’re going to be weakening the quarantine barriers to overseas imports, or anything like that. Anyone producing fruit in another country will still have to jump through every last hoop that they had to previously.
DEBORAH CAMERON: Alright. Thank you very much for your time this morning.
TONY BURKE: Great to be able to talk to you Deborah.
DEBORAH CAMERON: Ok. Tony Burke there.
© 2009 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
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