Here's what Minister Simon Crean has to say about the duopoly today - if it gets past the language filter http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-19/dairy-farmers-27screwed27-by-supermakets/4528068

Unfortunately we ALL have a part in this issue.

That 80% market share is you & me.....and most other Australians.

Unless consumers themselves take action and demand of Coles & Woolies that they need to do much better, the situation will never change.

We need our LOCAL food producers more than ever. The practices in food production in many overseas countries is worry to the health of Australians. That is those countries who have zero or very little quality control standards.

We seem to be taken for fools by C & W. Their ads on t.v. portray caring and patriotic companies who have the food producers and Australia's best interest at heart.

There are too many stories about producers being blackmailed into selling to produce C & W at lo, low prices.
Milk is a good example. It is reported that many diary farmers are unable to sustain a living given the current situation. yet C & W say they have absorbed the costs themselves. Someone is telling a porky.

I have also read that food labelled "produce of N.Z', is in many cases Chinese produce that is packaged in N.Z.
Chinese farmers reportedly use human excrement as fertilisers.

So we are again being taken as fools.

I often wonder what the quality of C &W gereneric brands. Knowing that duplicity seems to a tactic practiced on the Australian public, I would never buy a generic brand item - not matter the low cost.

To be fair it may very well not be JUST C & W, it may be IGA or Aldi....who knows.

The implications of dodgy and sub-standard food being dished up to Australians is worrying. If a company like Findus can sell meat labelled as beef, which is actually horse, then what else goes on we don't know about.
For Findus to blame their suppliers is pathetic.

But the bottom line is, that if we as consumers feel that supermarkets in general need to lift their game, we need to tell them. And we also need to source our food from the little guys more and more.....the markets, the small shops on Main Street, from the farm gate etc.

An obvious option is compulsory equalisation and stabilisation schemes for the producers. Forgotten, have we, that there was once an Egg Marketing Board? Its role was specifically to ensure reasonable returns and reasonable conditions, which seldom prevented it from achieving reasonable retail prices as well.

As the opposite, look to the WA farmers (led by the NFF and PGA) who've worked hard to destroy such schemes in the name of competition and capitalism.

Now, for much of the Southern region of WA, many farmers are at the limit of their financial capacity to keep farming. Agriculture Minister Terry Redman has warned that in some areas more than 10 per cent of farmers were unlikely to get finance to carry on for the 2013 season.

Several bad seasons worsened by the effects of climate change have caused many of those same farmers to press the WA govt to fund a voluntary multi-peril crop insurance scheme to insure grain farmers for input costs in the event of a drought, frost, fire or flood.

Naturally they are as always in denial that only a statutory insurance authority model would work, despite international experience being conclusive that traditional multiple-peril crop insurance is never commercially viable for such a purpose without government support. It might cost $150 million. Small change, quite frankly. WA Nationals' Royalties for Regions fund is expected to receive $1.2 billion this financial year, but was described as a waste of money after analysis by the Grattan Institute.

Improving Australia's resilience (the capacity of a system to absorb shocks and to continue functioning) is vital , one obvious reason being to withstand the greater impacts of more extreme natural disasters. Maintaining viable agricultural industry is essential; it is not an optional extra.

The underlying problem goes even deeper than Prof. Parker indicates. In general, the common law tradition accords property rights a central role. This is doubtless because it is the historical accretion of court actions brought by the wealthy in defense of their interests. It tends to see the transfer of a property right through entering into a contract as the epitome of freedom. The notion of "unconscionable conduct" is an uncomfortable after-thought that only reluctantly acknowledges the facts of unequal power and the potential for exploitation in such transactions. In fact, these power differentials are almost omni-present and so too is exploitation.

This case is not a perversion or distortion of our existing legal and economic norms: it is simply the reality of our system stripped bare. If you don't like it, there's no reason for your discontent to stop here.

This whole conflict is not only bigger than the ACCC investigation of bullying food producers, it is bigger than just food.
The whole so called Competition Policy is based on an outdated and ineffective economic theory that implies that both transparency, and the ability to interpret information is equal, and that rational judgement will always apply.
The supermarkets have reached their current level of power because of their ability to cross subsidise a sector of their business from other sectors to place potential competitors at a disadvantage.
The classic example is the fuel docket programe.
Move into the petrol retail market and grow market share by offering discounts related to your shopper dockets.
When you reach the stage where you effectively control pricing in that market, you can then boost base pricing and use discounts in that sector to dominate say the liquor market to gain control of that sector. And so on.
And if the Petrol retailers, or the independent liquor sellers or whoever try to form a group to protect themselves you just set the ACCC on to them suggesting uncompetitive behavior.
By the way has the ACCC ever made a study of the relationship between bowser prices and the level of discounts being advertised on shopper dockets in the lead up to the price window?
If price discussion between businesses is collusion, why does the same sort of discusion between different divisions of the one corporation not constitute the same offence.
The big two now effectively control the markets for groceries, fresh produce, liquor, poker machine gambling, hardware, homewares, motor fuel, low cost clothing, etc. They also have made significant moves into pharmacy, insurance, finance and other areas.
There is no way to bring our economy back to a free market system again without significant anti-trust laws related to the level of market share and the ability to use cross subsidisation as a market tool to gain and unfair advantage in a particular sector.
And that would take political will that I doubt exists considering that, by implication, the same sort of conditions would have to be applied to the media giants.