Economy
The erratic climate and extreme soil poverty have defied all attempts to develop large-scale agriculture in any part of Northern Australia apart from the Wet Tropics, where sugar cane and banana growing is a major industry, and the Lake Eyre Basin and surrounding areas where the dominant activity is rearing of sheep and beef cattle on extremely large properties. Despite the relatively fertile soils, land values owing to the extremely variable climate are very low. Beef cattle are raised elsewhere in the Northern Territory and Kimberley, but the quality of meat is very low because animals are slaughtered at quite an old age compared to cattle elsewhere in the world.
The geological factors that make Northern Australia's soils so unsuited to traditional agriculture, however, make it extremely rich in ores of abundant, insoluble lithophile metals such as aluminium, iron and uranium. It has the world's largest deposits of all these metals, and as less reactive chalcophile metals have been depleted Northern Australia has become very important to the economies of mineral-poor Asian nations. It was Northern Australian iron ore that fed the Japanese post-war economic miracle and the Four Tigers of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the government of Robert Menzies attempted to develop farming in Northern Australia, but pests made this impossible even when varieties of rice suited to the soils were developed. Today, however, sugar cane growing has expanded into the Ord River basin without surpassing cattle and tourism as the main industries of the region.
Read more about this topic: Northern Australia
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