Sharman Stone MP

Sharman Stone calls for urgent review of foreign investment in Australian agricultural land

June 29, 2011

It was shocking to hear today that a huge parcel of land has been sold to an off-shore owned mining company, Shenhua Watermark Coal who have picked up 43 farms on some of the best soils in Australia in northern New South Wales.

Apparently the intention is to convert the land from food and fibre growing to coalmining. The coalmining in the area of course has major impacts on the Great Artesian Basin, so it's not just a case of losing that land for food security, it also means losing our groundwater access for other agricultural production.

Federal Member for Murray, Sharman Stone, said today that enough is enough we must now have an urgent moratorium on further sales of agricultural land to any overseas companies.

“At the moment the purchase by foreign companies does not trigger any foreign investment consideration unless it is over $230 million. If a government is buying the land, that immediately triggers a foreign investment review board consideration. Clearly the Federal government is ignoring the impacts of these purchases or it does not understand the impacts,” Sharman Stone said.

“The Coalition has already urged the government to investigate foreign ownership of agricultural land and agribusiness. We passed a motion in March in Parliament requiring the Australian Bureau of Statistics to collect the information and analyse the impact of foreign ownership on Australian agriculture. This has just been ignored.

“We already have a number of dairy farms in northern Victoria purchased by Chinese interests. We have seen a food Company from Qatar buy up properties throughout Australia. Given they wish to give their countries some food security in the future, it is ridiculous that on the day after the Federal government released its own food plan for consultation we are seeing some of Australia's best food producing land passed into foreign hands.

“This ultimately means that the food produced will go straight back to their home countries to feed their citizens leaving Australians with less water access, less good soil access, fewer jobs and an all-round bad news outcome,” Sharman Stone said.

Sharman Stone said that the Federal and States Governments, who have a say in these purchases, must urgently review what is happening in Australia with the data collected, and the foreign review threshold of $230 million needs to be urgently directed down.