Angry farmers rally outside Australian parliament

CANBERRA, Australia — Angry farmers wearing broad-brimmed hats and cracking kangaroo-hide whips rallied outside Parliament Monday as one of their colleagues continued a hunger strike to demand compensation for Australian climate change policy.

The protest by 250 farmers and their supporters drew public attention to the plight of sheep farmer Peter Spencer, who they say is on the 43rd day of his hunger strike to protest that he is not allowed to clear vegetation from his 20,000 acre (8,000 hectare) farm.

The 61-year-old has been living since Nov. 23, 2009, on a platform 20 feet (6 meters) up a steel wind-monitoring tower on his alpine farm at Shannon’s Flat in New South Wales state, 55 miles (90 kilometers) south of Canberra, his supporters say.

State laws introduced throughout Australia since 1995 restrict the amount of land that farmers can clear of vegetation that absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Slowing land clearing is equivalent to reducing a country’s greenhouse gas emissions in calculations under the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol.

Washington Post