Wine grape growers and processors took 30 years to grow an industry to a prime exporter status. It then took two years of Government tax schemes to massively oversupply the market. These incentives continue.

The Government resorts to ''let the market rule'' when water is the issue, but what is a market? Surely it must be where participants have some competitiveness. Further, transfers out of the irrigation basins cause instability and a possible lack of viability for the remaining irrigators, communities, etc. Murray Darling Basin irrigators also have been forced to endure competition from overseas suppliers under the free market ideology, that is, import dumping which inevitably pushes domestic producers under. Australians must think carefully about losing national food self-sufficiency. The rest of the world does not screw its farmers. We are, and we blame them for what is actually government policy.

There is, however, a bigger agenda at work. When it comes to control of the food supply, both major parties are supporting the transfer of ownership from individual owner operators (about 120,000) to large indirectly subsidised (via the tax system) corporate owners (about eight). The biggest land holder in dollar terms is one of those eight and about 80-90 per cent of tradeable water has gone to those eight.

So what about the 48GL to be saved? Currently, under the 2020 plantation vision, we are, via managed investment schemes, consuming about 200,000ha a year of cleared high-rainfall farming country to convert to plantations for wood chips (again, very unfair competition for farmers in these areas).

In an area with an annual rainfall of about 800mm a year, each hectare of plantation consumes about 1.5ML of water over and above previous land use, according to CSIRO.

Every 32,000ha will wipe out 48GL of water catchment which would otherwise, have found its way into our rivers and aquifers. Like most of Australia, the Murray Darling Basin catchment is not short of these plantations.

Does the Government actually know what the left and right hands are doing? This is reaping havoc with the environment, people's lives, market forces and our future.

Robert Belcher is managing director, Sustainable Agricultural Communities Australia, a grazier in the Snowy High Country and chairman of Snowy River Interstate Landcare