Making Markets: Agricultural Restructuring in Australia

Abstract

In this chapter, I analyse agricultural restructuring internationally and in Australia following the Second World War and describe the changing Australian wheat marketing policy in this context. Policy makers argued that the deregulation of the wheat export market would provide growers with freedom and choice in their marketing decisions, and would allow growers to extract premium prices from the market. This marked a significant policy shift away from the redistributive function of the Australian Wheat Board, which had been established to equalise returns among growers. I examine academic and governmental literature on wheat export marketing policy, which is dominated by the agricultural economics discipline. This research has focused on the question of whether liberalised markets or statutory marketing is best able to maximise growers’ returns, to the exclusion of other important social, economic, and environmental issues, which have emerged in rural Australia in recent decades.