2024-05-28
The NSW Government’s announcement that they will end rice vesting for the Northern Rivers Rice Growers on 1 September 2024 and the whole of NSW from 1 July 2025 has been welcomed by the NSW Greens as a positive step towards introducing innovation, sustainability and competition into what has been a highly concentrated industry.
Greens MP and spokesperson for agriculture Sue Higginson said “The end of rice vesting in NSW is a critical step forwards in tackling controlling corporate interests in one of our most important food crops,”
“The rice vesting model has benefitted a single group of growers associated with a multinational corporation and had led to perverse practices of established interests that rely on the irrigation waters of the Murray Darling Basin squashing innovation and environmentally conscious changes to the industry, including climate adaptive dryland rice growing in the Northern Rivers region,”
“With the end of this monopoly, there is new opportunity for ethical, sensitive and competitive products to move this vital agricultural sector into the future and ensure that rice production in NSW is not strangled by a corporate monopoly,”
“This is a long awaited positive step forwards by the NSW Government. Rice growers from the Northern Rivers region have been calling for this for many years, but the former coalition government did not listen. The NSW Government has acted, demonstrating an understanding that agriculture must be able to keep pace with our changing knowledge, environment and climate,” Ms Higginson said.