YELLOW GOLD CAUSES RUSH ON FRUIT SHOPS
NINE MONTHS WITHOUT 'NANA MASH, INFANTS DESPAIR
Heartbreaking scenes of destruction for all Australian banana lovers.
I'm down to my last five bananas, and one's already on the turn, but I'm going to savour them all. Thanks to the genuises who thought it was a great idea to locate virtually all of Australia's banana farms in the same small region of North Queensland - Tully, Innisfail, Atherton and Kennedy - Australians must now hang their heads sadly and weep openly as they declare : Yes...We have no....bananas. We have...no...bananas...today!."
Or tomorrow.
$2 for a single banana?
Maybe even $3
More expensive than mangoes? The impact on Friday night cocktails, afternoon office snacks, kids' school lunches and infants' mushy breakfasts is going to be huge.
We have to make jokes, otherwise we'd cry.
Prices for bananas in Queensland are already hitting $6 and $7 a kilo. When stores open in Sydney tomorrow, browning stink banans are expected to fetch close to the QLD price, with June-July estimates going as high as $8, possibly even $10 a kilo..
Incredible.
Other Australian states grow bananas, but are unlikely to want to share around the golden goodness. No problem, New South Wales hosts most of the Australian Military's major bases, so if they won't share the bananas around, we'll just have to send in the troops to liberate us some of those bananas.
Despite the recent choruses of suckhole praise for free trade and globalisation/global trade, the Australian government is unlikely to allow foreign imports of bananas from local producing countries like The Philippines to reach our fruit shops.
Apparently there is an Australian Banana Growers Council who oversee the $320 million plus yearly trade of bananas between states, and fight like cornered bulldogs to keep foreign bananas out of the Australian market.
The biggest push to ease up such trade bans is likely to come from the supermarket empires like Coles and Woolworth's. This could get ugly. The Queensland growers won't be able to turn out a new crop until Christmas at the earliest, and the major supermarket chains will likely use this tremendous gap in production to bust the trade bans and get us back our cheap bananas.Stunning. The powerful banana lobby will be hitting up the Prime Minister John Howard during his visit to the cyclone ravaged regions today to pony up some fast cash so they can get the farms back into action. No insurance you see, banana crops are, apparently, uninsureable.
Sugarcane farmers have been hit hard as well, with losses estimated in the low $100 million range. Cane farmers have recieved more than $1 billion dollars in Howard government handouts in recent years as they struggled to survive droughts and heavy international export competition.
Besides bananas and sugar, Australians will also face massive shortages of paw-paws and avocadoes, with more than $15 million worth of avacado crops lost to the cyclone.
Hmm, here's an idea....
SPREAD THE NEW FARMS OUT ACROSS DIFFERENT STATES!
