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By Root 2055 0

forestry, and fisheries. Such nutrients as were present in arable soils at the onset of European agriculture quickly became exhausted. In effect, Australia’s first farmers were inadvertently mining their soils for nutrients. Thereafter, nutrients have had to be supplied artificially in the form of fertilizer, thus increasing agricultural production costs compared to those in more fertile soils overseas. Low soil productivity means low growth rates and low average yields of crops. Hence a larger area of land has to be cultivated in Australia than elsewhere to obtain equivalent crop yields, so that fuel costs for agricultural machinery such as tractors and sowers and harvesters (approximately proportional to the area of land that must be covered by the machines) also tend to be relatively high. An extreme case of infertile soils occurs in southwestern Australia, part of Australia’s so-called wheat belt and one of its most valuable agricultural areas, where wheat is grown on sandy soils leached of nutrients and essentially all nutrients must be added artificially as fertilizer. In effect, the Australian wheat belt is a gigantic flowerpot in which (just as in a real flowerpot) the sand provides nothing more than the physical substrate, and where the nutrients have to be supplied.

As a result of the extra expenses for Australian agriculture due to disproportionately high fertilizer and fuel costs, Australian farmers selling to local Australian markets sometimes cannot compete against overseas growers who ship the same crops across the ocean to Australia, despite the added costs of that overseas transport. For example, with modern globalization, it is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice concentrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees. The same is true of Canadian pork and bacon compared to their Australian equivalents. Conversely, in some specialized “niche markets”—i.e., crops and animal products with high added value beyond ordinary growing costs, such as wine—Australian farmers compete successfully in overseas markets.

A second economic consequence of low Australian soil productivity involves agroforestry, or tree agriculture, as discussed for Japan in Chapter 9. In Australian forests most of the nutrients are actually in the trees themselves, not in the soils. Hence when the native forests that the first European settlers encountered had been cut down, and when modern Australians had either logged the regrowing natural forests or invested in agroforestry by establishing tree plantations, tree growth rates have been low in Australia compared to those in other timber-producing countries. Ironically, Australia’s leading native timber tree (the blue gum of Tasmania) is now being grown more cheaply in many overseas countries than in Australia itself.

The third consequence surprised me and may surprise many readers. One doesn’t immediately think of fisheries as dependent on soil productivity: after all, fish live in rivers and in the ocean, not in soils. However, all of the nutrients in rivers, and at least some of those in oceans near the coastline, come from the soils drained by the rivers and then carried out into the ocean. Hence Australia’s rivers and coastal waters are also relatively unproductive, with the result that Australia’s fisheries have been quickly mined and overexploited like its farmlands and its forests. One Australian marine fishery after another has been overfished to the point of becoming uneconomic, often within just a few years of the fishery’s discovery. Today, out of the nearly 200 countries in the world, Australia has the third-largest exclusive marine zone surrounding it, but it ranks only 55th among the world’s countries in the value of its marine fisheries, while the value of its freshwater fisheries is now negligible.

A further feature of Australia’s low soil productivity is that the problem was not perceptible to the first European settlers. Instead, when they encountered magnificent extensive woodlands that