Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on and support the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research Amendment Bill 2007. The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research is currently a statutory authority that operates as part of the Australian government’s development cooperation programs. The centre encourages Australia’s agricultural scientists to use their skills for the benefit of developing countries and also for the benefit of Australia. The Centre for International Agricultural Research funds research projects that are developed within a framework that reflects the priorities of Australia’s aid program and national research strengths together with the agricultural research and development priorities of partner countries. Its mandate directs activities to developing countries in five regions: Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, South-East Asia, North Asia, South Asia and southern Africa. Research is also allocated across regions through funding to the international agricultural research centres. ACIAR’s key functions are to commission research into improving sustainable agricultural production in developing countries—a very important objective. Also, it funds project related training; it communicates the results of funded research; it conducts and funds development activities related to research programs; and it administers the Australian government’s contribution to the international agricultural research centres.

The purpose of the bill before the House, as others before me have indicated, is to implement changes to the corporate governance of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, to enact revised governance arrangements in its enabling legislation, as part of the government’s response to the 2003 Review of the Corporate Governance of Statutory Authorities and Office Holders, known as the Uhrig review. The bill also replaces existing governance arrangements within the centre to reflect the executive management model recommended in the Uhrig review. Key changes involve the abolition of the board of management of the centre, along with the office of the director, and the creation of a Commission for International Agricultural Research and a new position of chief executive officer. The commission will be established to provide collective decision making and expert advice to the minister on specific aspects of the centre’s operations, including program formulation, priority setting and funding. Consistent with the executive management model in the Uhrig review, responsibility for the administrative and financial management of the centre will be conferred on the new position of CEO, which will be directly accountable to the minister. These changes, it is said, are aimed at clarifying and segregating the administrative and advisory functions of the centre to ensure best practice in corporate governance.

The bill also revokes the centre’s body corporate status, as the retention of the centre as a legal personality separate from the Commonwealth has been assessed as unnecessary given that the centre is budget funded, is a prescribed agency under the Financial Management and Accountability Act 1997 and does not need to own any assets in its own right.

The bill does not—and the parliamentary secretary pointed this out in his second reading speech—change the functions or objectives of the Policy Advisory Council established under the act. The only changes in this regard include amendments to the council’s constitution to reflect the new governance arrangements, and provisions to ensure that there is no duplication in membership between the council and the commission—and the bill does not change the functions of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. The bill includes transitional arrangements to ensure that the governance changes do not disrupt the performance of the centre’s function.

The bill gives me an opportunity to say something about the present state of international agricultural research and pass on to the House some conversations which I recently had with experts in this area from two bodies—Bioversity International and the Food and Agriculture Organisation. In the conversations I had with a number of representatives from those organisations, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research came up on a number of occasions. I am pleased to report that the view of these international experts on the work done by our centre was overwhelmingly positive.

The context in which I had these discussions was very much about the impacts of global warming, climate change, on agriculture. Indeed, those impacts are prospectively quite serious. I met with the director of Bioversity International, Dr Emile Frison. He discussed the role of plants in climate change adaptation. For example, forests are a long-term investment, and we need to be able to predict what climate changes will occur and which species will prevail. Bioversity International is developing models to achieve this.

To date, many species in tropical forests are inadequately studied. Bioversity has an office in Kuala Lumpur which is doing work on this in the Asia-Pacific region. Small island countries—for example, those in the Pacific—need to work on a regional basis. In addition, there is a need for diversity—planting numbers of different crops as a climate change adaptation safeguard. Bioversity is collecting and studying plant genetic material for projects such as an Indonesian project on banana wilt diseases. That is being carried out under the auspices of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. It is also carrying out projects on, for example, coconut genetic resources in the Pacific to examine the potential of coconut oil as a biofuel.

One of the points that Dr Frison made was that these sorts of crops and biodiversity should be used to improve the livelihood of poor people. When we talk about things like bioenergy, we need to understand what its impact on our poorer people will be. For example, Bioversity is concerning itself with the quality of nutrition. The Millennium Development Goals have led to significant efforts to increase the food supply of poor people, but there has not been enough attention paid to the quality of the food. More calories are available per capita, but the displacement of traditional diets by poorer diets has had some negative health impacts, including the emergence of so-called diseases of affluence such as cancer and obesity. Television is promoting a desire for junk food in rural villagers.

Bioversity is seeking to rehabilitate the image of some traditional foods, such as leafy vegetables, which have suffered by being seen as backward or not modern. For example, there is the Kenyan project which led to the introduction of these leafy vegetables to the parliamentary canteen menu. In some Pacific islands, where more than 50 per cent of the population is overweight, work has been done on identifying and promoting varieties of bananas which are rich in vitamin A. Dr Frison expressed some concern at the recent drying up of funds for this kind of work from the United Nations Global Environment Facility. He said that no money had been forthcoming from this source for the past 12 months, which has slowed Bioversity’s work considerably.

I also spoke with Annie Lane from Bioversity. She has been working in the area of climate change mitigation, researching crop diversity and capacity to deal with extreme weather events, including drought. She coordinated Bioversity’s crop wild relatives work. She says that more funding coming from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research would help both Australia and developing countries. For example, she is working with various botanical gardens, which can act as refuges for vulnerable species at risk of being pushed over the edge by climate change. She is modelling the impact of global warming on various crops and their wild relatives. I will give you a couple of examples of the impacts. In 50 years most wild peanut species will have no climatically suitable habitat in Latin America. They cannot move up the slopes of the mountains, as it were; that habitat is not suitable. In any event, most plants cannot move quickly and cannot move at all if their habitat fragmented and there are no corridors. The example from Australia I was provided comes from Western Australia. It is a bioclimatic analysis of the distribution of 819 eucalypt species which was carried out back in 1996 by the ecologist Lesley Hughes and colleagues. It showed that about 200 species of Australia’s 819 eucalypts had a climatic range of less than one degree Celsius mean annual temperature, so obviously temperature variations will greatly affect the ability of these species to survive. The research studies predict serious effects over the course of the next 60 years in a biodiversity hot spot for eucalypts in Western Australia.

Crop wild relatives include crop ancestors as well as other species more or less closely related to crops. They are a critical source of genes for resistance to diseases, pests and stresses such as drought and extreme temperatures. The use of wild relatives has led to improved resistance to wheat curl mite, late blight in potato and grassy stunt disease in rice. They have been used to improve tolerance to drought in wheat and acid sulphate soils in rice. Wild relatives have also been used to raise the nutritional value of some crops. Protecting crop wild relatives helps to ensure that adequate genetic diversity exists in a particular crop’s gene pool. Increasing genetic uniformity makes crops more vulnerable to stress. Devastating losses in the American maize crop caused by a corn blight outbreak in the USA highlighted the risk of relying on just a few high-yielding varieties. Natural populations of wild relatives are unfortunately increasingly at risk due to overexploitation and the loss of habitat. There was a global project funded by the United Nations Environment Program’s Global Environment Facility back in 2004 which examined these risks. It is clear that rising global temperatures are threatening crop wild relatives with extinction at the very time they are most needed. The adverse impacts of global warming on agricultural systems can be mitigated by using crop wild relatives, which can help adapt cultivated crops to changing climate conditions.

There was a study conducted by Bioversity International and the International Rice Research Institute which estimated the current and future geographical distribution of the wild relatives of three of the world’s major food crops—potato, peanut and cowpea—based on 19 climate variables. The study predicts that, by 2055, something like 18 per cent to 25 per cent of all of these potato, peanut and cowpea species could become extinct, and that most species could lose over 50 per cent of the land area that is currently suited to them. As many as 31 of the 51 wild peanuts studied are likely to become extinct and the distribution area of the remainder will be reduced by more than 90 per cent.

I also met recently with representatives of the Food and Agriculture Organisation. The Food and Agriculture Organisation is examining the role of agriculture and of forestry in mitigating global warming. Its key personnel see opportunities for developing countries to benefit from bioenergy. Forestry can play a role in capturing CO and in a carbon neutral cycle involving wood energy. I met with Dr Gustavo Best, who is the Senior Energy Coordinator of the Sustainable Development Department. Dr Best said that issues which need to be resolved are issues of land tenure, the role of local populations and who benefits from forestry and agriculture projects. It is clearly not helpful for high-tech projects to take small farmers off the land. The impact of bioenergy on food prices and the impact of monocultures on biodiversity also need to be assessed. If a crop is grown for energy rather than food, does its price go up and will food become unaffordable? Dr Best said there had been little systematic work done on the impact of bioenergy on food prices and food availability.

The Netherlands has introduced requirements that bioenergy contracts must be sustainable in the ecosystem where the crop is grown. This followed an outcry from non-government organisations over a palm oil contract in Malaysia which ended up being cancelled due to concerns about adverse social and environmental impacts. Biomass needs to be sustainable in its use of water and in its energy balance. Dr Best said, for example, that maize grown in the United States has more energy put into it than it actually produces, so it is only economic due to domestic subsidies. Brazilian sugar, on the other hand, is a net energy producer. He sees considerable potential in sugar cane, soya, castor oil, sunflower oil and from research now being carried out on the conversion of cellulose.

Biofuels are receiving a shot in the arm from the European Union directive increasing the target percentage for biofuels in the fuel mix for European vehicles from 5.7 per cent in 2008 to 10 per cent by 2010. Principal sources of supply are likely to be eastern European—Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. Oilseeds are now an attractive investment to produce biodiesel. This is good news for producers, who get a higher return, but not such good news for consumers because the cost of food goes up. A number of crops are showing bioenergy potential—soya, rapeseed, palm oil and sweet sorghum, which is doing well in semiarid areas and may have potential in Australia. The cost of ethanol in Brazil has fallen from 1970 to 2000 due to research breakthroughs, but it still requires a lot of water. There is a need to create synergies between bioenergy production and food production through means such as annual cropping, changing the crop, injecting nitrogen and assisting biodiversity.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation are looking closely at climate change adaptation. Their knowledge of agricultural practices, water management and soil management is being put to use in climate change adaptation. Countries like Bangladesh—which are not the cause of global warming, and this raises some serious moral issues—have to work on farm practices and health issues raised by more frequent and severe flooding. The Food and Agriculture Organisation indicated to me that they would like more contact with Australia. There was more contact some years ago on other issues. They also indicated that there is a need to protect corridors of vegetation for biodiversity and to guard against insect pests and diseases.

There are great opportunities for Australia in South-East Asia through emissions trading. So far emissions trading has not helped forestry projects much. Japan is an exception, having invested in forestry projects to get carbon reduction certificates. The Clean Development Mechanism has had little impact on agriculture; it has had more impact on landfill and biogas.

We need policies and knowledge to answer questions like: is there enough land? Are we threatening the environment? Are we threatening small farmers? The circumstances, and therefore the answers to these questions, will vary from region to region, country to country, and locality to locality. Some major non-government organisations have been presenting bioenergy as a threat to sustainable development because of the problems with increasing intensity of land use and threats to biodiversity. Certainly it is Dr Best’s view that the message for politicians about bioenergy needs to be scientifically based, objective and the product of long-term research, and that bioenergy cannot and should not be treated in isolation from the environment, rural development or the energy sector. Bioenergy has to be further integrated into energy policies in many countries.

The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research appears to me to be well regarded abroad, but the goodwill which this body generates for our agricultural sector has, of course, been completely undermined by the scandal surrounding Australia’s wheat marketing arrangements in the wake of the AWB scandal. The payment by AWB of $300 million in bribes to Saddam Hussein is a matter of national shame. Unfortunately, there is no sign this week that the government has learnt anything from this debacle. I am pleased to support the legislation, wish it a speedy passage through the House and hope that it enables the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research to continue its good work.

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