I have just got off the phone to Sunrice to ascertain what proportion of their rice is grown on the Ord. They inform me, quite happily, that all of their rice is sourced from the Murray-Darling system.Ok, I declare I am picky about food miles, food and lots of other things but in this day and age of water management, not to mention the 10 year-ish drought we are coming out of, when the Murray-Darling irrigation system is so over-allocated, when Adelaide is screaming for water for human consumption, when wetlands are dying, WHY ARE WE GROWING RICE ON THIS RIVER????
Obviously I will never knowingly buy the product again - it is an absolute travesty of resource wastage! Okay MG, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in again, think 'calm blue ocean'...
This one phone call it has solved my rice 'problem' I will be buying Asian rice, where they have the water to grow the crop. I will advise of a specific brand when I have done some more research. That will certainly be more environmentally sensible than allowing this abomination to continue, with my consumer dollar, for one more minute.
Okay MG, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in again, think 'calm blue ocean'...
6 comments:
Now chicki, dont be having a rice hissy yet...what about the people they employ?...the water perhaps is used more than once...I would rather keep aussies employed then prop up asia...
I remember when the campaign was buy Australian...
now, now MG. The water used to grow what is a food item and there fore life sustaining is minimal comparitivly to the volumes that are raped from the basin by the cotton growers of sw Qld. I think it is better to by aussie rice and pay the taxs to develop environmental answers to the murray-darling issues than to support the whole sale clearing of asian forrests to grow crops that are tended by slaves and exploit resources without any checks and balances.
i'm with nairbe on this one MG...I have seen the damage done by large scale cotton operations...I admire your passion and your willingness to put your money where your mouth is so to speak...xo
I used to have a real thing to do with rice, too, though it wasn't so much to do with "food miles" as the fact that I feared that by eating rice in the so-called "West" (what a ridiculous saying: e.g. Australia and New Zealand are "western" but about as far East (using the international date line as your marker) as you can go!...
yeah I feared we were depriving starving people in Bangladesh and Africa their rice by eating it ourselves... but apparently it's not as simple
also years ago I had a thing about the Body Shop putting bananas, passion fruit etc into their soaps and shampoo... aren't those FOODS I asked myself?... aren't we DEPRIVING hungry people of food so we can SQUISH IT IN OUR HAIR?.. but nobody not even my friends really took my views seriously... SUDDENLY this bio-fuel really is called "bad" because it's using up ground that could be growing rice/wheat etc for human consumption and the whole thing becomes something the PC bourgeoisie feel they must fight their 5c worth for...
great blog btw... sure I've been here before (haven't I commented?..??)
Well haven't I started a conversation!
Firstly Nairbe, I agree with you about the cotton industry of Queensland - fortunately I don't have to officially boycott that one cos I am sure I couldn't afford to buy Australian grown and made cotton ( a t-shirt comes out at about $70).... otherwise, they have long been boycotted.
That rice is a food and is more 'worthy' of using valuable water than cotton or other non-food items but, perhaps apart form the Ord region, has merit.
The bigger issue is that Australia just isn't suitable to grow this product - it needs water and, like it or not, we primarily live in a marginal desert area - we just don't have the water to spare. Add to that we are moving off the back of a 10 year drought that in most areas is the worst in history. That alone has almost killed the river system in some areas.
I am scarily pro-active in buying Australian food over pretty much anything else but this is something I have to take a stand on.
Take the forestry industry as an example (I am thinking WA cos I know that better than over here). Cutting down trees and turning them into woodchips is something we have done for generations but society got to the point where it actually placed a value on the environment and that value progressively became high enough to shut down the logging of old-growth forests. Yes jobs were lost and local economies were effected (thinking of the town of Manjimup as a prime example).
The government did provide some funding for retraining and new businesses and payouts but I am not pretending the process didn't hurt anyway.
I guess it comes down to my belief that some products (like woodchips and rice) do far much more damage to the environment than the money they provide. It is a greedy philosophy that puts money as the ultimate outcome for an economy.
And if I can find some Fair Trade rice, then I am providing a real income to a family while not raping the land. I can live with that....
Welcome to the Musings Gledwood :-)
I find the bio-fuel industry another interesting one. Ideally to move away from a petrochemical reliant world would be wonderful. Then I started to realize that much of the land they are using was transferred from that used for food production. Well that's not going to work in the long term!
And using quality food for luxury beauty products is debatable - I have to agree with you on that one.
Sigh, some days it gets hard to be ethical :-)
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