The reality is this is an extremely serious issue that well could be industry making or braking.

This problem won't go away, more fashion houses will follow the lead set by the manufacturers and retailers.

As a wool grower I am committed to helping find a solution.

For once we as an industry must work together and be open and honest with our customers with regard to progress.

congratulations on this excellent summary of the mulesing situation.

It is time for our leaders to be transparent and genuine with our treatment of this issue with all parties.

Political spin for whatever domestic reason won't wash with savy consumers of wool.

As IWTO agreed, frank and open communication is the secret here for all in the pipeline.

Imagine getting to 2010, and the industry has still not managed to produce any alternative. What happens then?

In essence, is the whole debate now about breech skin removal (not flesh removal) of sheep, or is it about mans right to farm animals in a new and concerned world of consumers?

Many of life's activities are unpleasant, including but not limited to the slaughter of animals for meat consumption or fibre production.

Indeed, if major retailers were to be taken on a close up tour of how an abattoir works for instance, would those same retailers then close down their butchery divisions because of the bloody nature of such a process?

With all respect to the sensitive vegetarian community, but red meat consumption is on the increase in many countries across the world, with billions of animals slaughtered every day to feed a hungry world.

It is surmised that on any day of the world, that only 30 - 37 days of consumable food exists at any one time for the world's human population.

In these conditions then, humane farming practices must be tempered with a knowledge that mass hunger and chaos is never far away depending on the nature of this planet.

Such talk of banning mulesing seems small, and to be no more than fashionable than anything else, and has no real meaning to many of Australia's wool growers who wish to eke out a living growing wool and meat from Merino sheep, being allowed to do so because of important operations such as mulesing.

Retailers may wish to have a care, that their wishes to ban important on farm operations to protect sheep, could indeed lead to the extinction of the classic Australian Merino sheep, and an end to the farming and provision of a magnificent fibre that supports hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world, from a farm in Goulburn through the pipeline to a tailor in Fleet St.

Besides the practice of mulesing, Merino sheep have comparatively the most passive painfree and safe existence of any farm animal in the world.

Australia's wool farmers provide Merino sheep with the opportunity to graze in large paddock environments in a safe and healthy farming system, unilke wild ruminants in Africa for instance, whose life is often cut brutally short by everything and anything.

Surely it is time for these retailers to maybe ask us first before imposing boycotts, particularly why we mules, and what we are genuinely doing to find solutions, before acting on false information from rights extremists.

Oh how true is the critisism of our AWI by those present at the Beijing conference, not being open and honest.

Not open and honest with those attending IWTO but certainely not with those they represent and the consumers that we supply.

The first lesson in marketing is and always has been the customer is always RIGHT!!!(even if they have the facts mixed up and their needs are extreme).

The customer wants wool from non-Mulesed sheep.

The question is not the right and wrongs of that and 4 Million $ of Legal fees, but how do we put a system/protocol in place that will give the consumer the choice and then the guarantee that she/he is actually purchasing that.

The fact is there is no system that Certifies that along the hopelessly long and clumsy supply chain.

In fact I would go as far as stating that consumer protection as to what is purchased is not only lacking re unmulesed wool but also in the marketing of all woollen products.

An organically grown clip of wool has to be processed. The certification from farm to customer does not necessaraly flow with the raw product. Yet we can say the wool was organically grown.

Marketing allows us to say Australian grown forgetting to state "canned" in China or Made in Australia yet all parts were only glued together in Australia.

The AWI is doing all those growers, consumers and processors a huge disservice by not spending our precious dollars and time on the real art of marketing and that is to give the customer what it wants by putting in place the protocols that will guarantee for the consumer the choice to purchase what they wish and the grower the ability to meet that market.

Only this will enable a premium to be made for those that are able to supply that need.

We have a number of growers that do not mules (I would suggest none of us want to) but like Andrew Reid from Gundagai (Interview ABC Country Hour) do not receive one extra $ for the extra work and expense needed.

Many of us would be able to supply EU Eco Certified chemical free wool, we do not bother to mark it as there is no guarantee that that wool will not be blended with an inferior type to save a $ and then be processed using chemicals totally defeating the objective of what was supplied and the consumer missing out.

I believe the Merino industry's biggest issue is - be it Organic, Ethical Carbon Neutral, Mulesing, Eu Eco or anything else - wool suffers from the need to blended to create commercial volume for processing based on a formula to maximise $ return instead of customer requirement.

Our Woolboard should take a look at the achievements of our meat boards in quality assurance programs and apply that to the wool industry.

Let's take the emotions out of the Mulesing debate and concentrate on supplying the customer with what they want, guaranteed and transparent through the entire supply chain.