Thanks very much. I apologize for gatecrashing your committee. I'm very grateful, and if you come to Australia, we'll let you gatecrash one of our committees as a consequence.
I chair the Senate Select Committee on Agricultural and Related Industries in Australia. At the present time I'm doing an inquiry, in which you would be interested I'm sure, into the global cartel and monopoly behaviour of fertilizer companies. Eighty-five per cent of the world's rock phosphate is controlled by five companies.
Another committee that I'm chairing has the terms of reference for how we in the future will produce food that's affordable to the consumer, sustainable to the environment, and viable to the farmer--in other words, make it worthwhile for the farmer to get out of bed and be paid a reasonable margin for his work, against the background of things like consolidated retailing--that is, market pairing in retailing--the cartels of fuel and fertilizer, the effect of climate change, and a range of other issues.
The science we've collected in Australia shows that in Australia over the next 50 years.... The rainfall is in decline now, and this year if there isn't a serious, major rainfall event in southern Australia, the main river system is going to fail. It will stop flowing. Our biggest dam is down to 4%. Three of our rivers have three months' supply left in them. In the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, where we have 6.2% of Australia's run-off--23,000 gigalitres--we do 73% of our water farming. If the science is 30% right on the prediction for the future, we're going to have to reconfigure the way we've settled and we do business in rural and regional Australia. There are big opportunities in the north, which for us is more or less an agricultural frontier.
Against that background, I would be interested in coming to terms with the doubling of the global food task in the next 40 years. The science is telling us that 30% of the agriculture capacity of Asia, where two-thirds of the world's population will live in the future, could go out of production. We decided to have a look at how Australia can continue to make its contribution to the global food task. I'm sure that's an issue that would interest the people in Canada. We are a net exporter of food. Our scientists at the CSIRO, our senior science base, is telling us that unless we get up to speed with technology and come to terms with what's going on, we will have no wheat to export by the year 2070. At the present time we export $4.2 billion worth of food.
Against that background, and with your indulgence, Mr. Chairman--and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to address your committee--we in Australia were interested in the consolidated retailing side with the ACCC as our supervising body. At a parliamentary level, we have challenged some of the findings of the ACCC. For instance, the ACCC said in an investigation they conducted that there wasn't a problem in fertilizer sales in Australia. One company has 73% of the wholesale sales and 100% of the manufacture, and yet they said there wasn't a monopoly. So we challenged that. We're now undoing that monopoly. We are bringing into production a couple more phosphate mines, which again will treble our phosphate capacity.
In our retailing, we have two companies, Coles and Woolworths, that control 70% of our retailing. I note from my notes that you have five companies that control 60% of your retailing. We have two companies that control 70-odd per cent. The United States, I notice, has five companies that control 40%. What I was interested in is whether you, by regulation.... I spoke to the person from your ACCC equivalent this morning, who said that for them as the regulator, if there isn't 35% of the market tied up by one body, it's not an issue. I was just wondering where you fellows were up to. We'd be interested; you seem to be doing better than we are.
Swift, the Brazilian company who has just taken over CONAGUA's interest in Australia—will have 40% of the kill in Australia. We note that our farmers are getting between 40% and 50% less per beast at the farm gate, and our consumers are paying 40% to 50% more at the supermarket than the Americans are.
I'm just interested to hear how you're getting on here in Canada.