MIS damage

(Bob Loone has updated his letter originally published in the TAP newspaper (summer edition) with the latest impacts of MIS on farmland in the Meander municipaility. Editor)


Just in the Meander Valley Municipality over 15,000 ha of highly productive farmland have been destroyed by Managed Investment Scheme (MIS) forestry corporations. That's 75 farms of @ 200ha (500 acres) which consisted of mostly family farms, many with irrigation or low cost irrigation potential, with better class of soils and higher rainfall than the midlands.


Plantation forestry is unsustainable. It destroys soil fertility, aerial spraying poisons our ratepayers, closes down businesses and destroys jobs, tourism, agricultural production and potential. The most worrying aspect of all is that these MIS corporation absentee landowners (and that includes Gunns Ltd) are very likely to let that land fall into the ownership of a foreign country or multinational corporations.  It will be lost to future generations.


Forestry has deceived both State and Federal governments into supporting, at a huge and ongoing cost to taxpayers, the destructive and ongoing MIS scams. The MIS scams are a self-imposed national tragedy. MIS has been and continues to be a blight, a community killer, a cancer on our municipalities. 


Bob Loone, Deputy Mayor, Meander Valley.