But allow me to rant for a moment.
God I hate 1st world agricultural interests. What a bunch of sentimentalists and welfare queens they are. My family were all dairy farmers in rural Canada for generations. Now, they're all professionals in Toronto, Vancouver and the U.S.. Why'd they get out of the farming business? Because its a bad business. The hours are bad, the finances are a nightmare and you're always at the mercy of government subsidy programs .
It makes people into whining curmudgeons.
I realize that Autralia has a large natural-resources economy, but surely rich Tasmanian poppy growers can handle crop substitution better than Afghans whose very lives depend on what they can scratch from the earth each year. A wealthy, sophisticated nation like Australia has no business having its policies decided by a bunch of whining farmers.
On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 12:22 AM, Bill Bartlett
<billbartlett at aapt.net.au> wrote:
> At 11:22 PM -0400 10/9/08, Shane Mage wrote:
>
>> On Sep 10, 2008, at 10:55 PM, boddi satva wrote:
>>
>>> I just heard this guy for the first time today, and I'm fascinated by
>>> this because it has always seemed to me that the weapon the world
>>> should be using against warlordism and terrorism is money.
>>>
>> But that's an evil, evil, thought. It leads to perverted ideas like
>> buying the Afghan opium crop to convert into morphine to relieve pain and
>> thus winning the peasantry to eliminate the terrorism and warlordism that
>> flourish only because the peasants know themselves to be the targets of a
>> "War" on drugs that kills some of them in order to starve the rest.
>
> That idea certainly wouldn't go down well in Tasmania, the cockies around
> here grow thousands of acres of poppies for manufacture into morphine etc
> and its a big income earner. Then there's the processing factories, one of
> which is a few miles away from me at Westbury.
>
> Competition from Afghan farmers is the last thing your Australian allies
> would be prepared to wear. Any such suggestion would be seen as extremely
> ungrateful, after all our faithful support in the "war on terror".
>
> Sure, it seems a logical thing to do. It would probably work too. building
> factories to process poppy alkaloids would be great for Afghanistan. The
> fact is that such an industry would make it very much in the interests of
> the locals to suppress illegal drugs trade. In order to keep the licence to
> print money that a legal opium industry is. Plus growing opium poppies for
> legal trade is far more lucrative for the actual farmers, and it would
> underwrite the industrialisation of agriculture which is the precondition
> for a modern society.
>
> All well and good, in a sane world. But it isn't a sane world is it? The one
> export crop that Afghanistan seems to good at, one of the most lucrative
> crops of all, must be denied to them. For political reasons. Mustn't upset
> the allies and that is one thing that Australia isn't going to lie down for.
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas
>
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