Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/111460
industryfocus Mareeba and Dimbulah in Queensland were once rippling with green fields of tobacco, but slowly the forces of social disapproval and free trade killed the crop. Jeremy Chunn looks at how the region's farmers moved on. T conceded as much. Manufacturers agreed to chip in $10.8 million to help restructure the sector, and the Queensland, Victorian and NSW governments matched the payment. Federal government put in $40.9 million to buy out licences and help growers change their crops or business. Of that, $23 million went to growers in northern Queensland. Mareeba is in the Atherton Tableland, about 70 kilometres west of Cairns. Nowadays, Australia's former 'Tobacco Capital' turns out a bit of everything but, along with nearby Dimbulah, the area used to bag more than half the leaf used in more than half the tailor-mades smoked in Australia. Prices and quotas were set. What could possibly go wrong? Maria Maloberti's family got out of the tobacco industry in the 1980s. "The writing was on the wall," she says, "and we jumped before we were pushed." She describes the industry as being "pretty rotten right across the board", with the perception of regulation of prices not reflecting a reality where some growers were penalised via an opaque system that favoured those who didn't "stir the pot". She says growers who asked for price rises were told the anti-smoking lobby was ripping profits away from cigarette makers. There was no hope of farmers dictating the terms. "In agriculture you're always a price taker, never a price maker," she says. Illustration : Jeremy Wood hese days, smoking can make you feel like a social pariah. Make a habit of it and you'll feel the health effects, not to mention feed more tax to the government. But what if you just grow the stuff? In the days before plain cigarette packaging and smoke-free public zones, the demand for cigarettes fed a legitimate sector of Australian agriculture. In Australia the first tobacco was planted in Parramatta not long after the First Fleet landed, and the crop grew and grew until the heady days of the 1970s, when about 16,000 tonnes of leaf a year was sold by local growers to buyers from Philip Morris and British American Tobacco Australia (then WD & HO Wills). Queensland growers cultivated 58 per cent of the crop, with 38 per cent grown in Victoria and the remainder in NSW. It was the days of big government, with the Australian Tobacco Marketing Advisory Committee regulating prices for tobacco and ruling that cigarette makers had to include 57 per cent Aussie leaf. But as the 1980s dawned, pump classes and mineral water became the new vogue. Demand dropped for smokes and local growers suffered. The glory days of smoking were losing their puff. In 1994 an industry commission found tobacco was the most subsidised agricultural activity in the country. Suddenly, the game was up. The growers 65