‘Industry taking advantage of government subsidies’

THE government’s continued support of the agriculture sector is creating an unsustainable cycle of subsidies and crowding out industry players from financing farmers, a business official has said.
Following successive droughts and years of falling output, the government has initiated several farmer support schemes to lower the cost of farming but Graeme Murdoch, the operations director at PHI Commodities, a local company which specialises in brokering grain, told a manufacturing industry forum last week that the arrangement has made private companies “lazy” to fund farmers.

This year alone, the government has budgeted a total of $46,3 billion for various agricultural activities while Treasury has also reported that the sector took up most of the Covid-19 $18,2 billion stimulus p