There’s still a lot of life in the Goulburn Valley food industry

The Goulburn Valley (GV) Food Co-operative has used local workers and local produce to manufacture their first 5000 ‘meal for four under $10’ pasta and sauce meals.

The product is on sale at 20 local food shops plus locations in Brunswick in Melbourne and Annandale in Sydney. Hopefully it will be picked up by some of the supermarket chains as it looks pretty good in its Peter Russell-Clarke decorated bags, and the fact it is locally made from local ingredients is another huge plus as it gives consumers an Australian alternative to multinational food company chains.

GV Co-operative chairman Les Cameron said: “We started on this journey trying to keep Heinz in Australia. We now realise we are fighting to keep any food produced in Australia.”

When Heinz closed its Girgarre tomato processing plant in January 2012, 146 locals lost their jobs. These workers joined together and tried to buy the closed site so they could open their own manufacturing plant but Heinz refused to sell. Eighteen months later the site is still unsold and the three-quarters of a million offered by the GV Food Co-Op still the highest offer put on the table.

After two attempts to open their own plant (the second attempt thwarted by the failure of the non-bank Banksia) the group ended up deciding to run a virtual factory by using Australian-owned operations that needed the work to make their products. Their pasta and sauce meals are made from tomatoes grown locally at Rochester, with the bag containing the organic pasta made at Casalere in Kyabram with the co-op’s own ‘Global Spices’ sauce made at Riverina Grove, Griffith, in NSW.

Apart from some of the spices for the sauce, the pasta and sauce combination is made from Australian produce. It is a powerful statement of the need to ensure the country’s food security, and why the Goulburn Valley matters.

The impact of Heinz withdrawing from Girgarre was not limited to the 146 workers who lost their jobs and their families. There was a chain of local businesses that relied on Heinz: the growers, the local truckers, companies that made the labels and bottles. In all, it’s estimated another 700 jobs were affected.

Now the Goulburn Valley is facing another crisis as the valley’s major remaining food processor, iconic fruit and tomato cannery SPC Ardmona in Shepparton, is under extreme pressure.

The Productivity Commission has begun its inquiry into whether the government should enact safeguard measures to protect SPC Ardmona and the Australian fruit and tomato industry from the inflow of cheap, low-quality imported canned fruits by supermarkets, which threatens to destroy businesses.

Predatory discounting by Coles and Woolworths has seen SPC Ardmona’s sales drop from about 75% of the canned fruit market to about 33% in the past three years, with imports now above 50%. The high Australian dollar has led to the devastation of SPC’s export market.

The AMWU, as the direct representatives of workers at SPC Ardmona, has supported the company’s push for a decision under World Trade Organisation rules as sales continue to fall.

Commission Chairman Peter Harris and Assistant Commissioner Paul Barrett have three months to report, before a wider inquiry.

AMWU Food & Confectionary Division President Tom Hale Who was in the valley to celebrate the GV Food Co-ops launch, said about 600 direct jobs and thousands of others in associated transport and supply industries were at stake in the Shepparton region.

“There’s a tremendous flow-on impact from SPC in a community where unemployment is already at 8.7 per cent,” he said.

Many growers in the Goulburn Valley have already gone out of business, unable to even afford to rip out their fruit trees, as SPC has cancelled half of next year’s local fruit contracts.