ABSTRACT
Since 1992, the Australian government has implemented a number of strategies designed to capitalize on the ostensibly natural market provided to Australian food exporters by the rapidly growing populations and economies of Asia (Pritchard 1999). On the surface, increased exports to the region appeared to offer a win-win solution to export-oriented Australian farmers faced with the need to secure new markets in order to arrest declining terms of trade, and to Asian governments and consumers faced with the prospect of procuring enough food of sufficient variety to satisfy both the basic needs of growing populations and the changing tastes of the affluent middle classes. Despite the seemingly straightforward logic of positioning Australia as a ‘Supermarket to Asia’, in 2002 Philippine farmers hurled rotten vegetables at metropolitan supermarkets in protest at the importation of Australian vegetables (Lacuarta 2002a). Local government representatives claimed that between April and October 2002, produce from the mountainous Cordillera region worth P21 million (approximately US$400,000) was displaced from Metro Manila and Cebu markets by imported vegetables (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2002), some 93 per cent of which were sourced in Australia and sold under the misleading local name ‘Baguio vegetables’ (Lacuarta 2002b).
