Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I compliment the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry on his statement. I heard him make similar remarks last night to the meeting of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers. I thought that was a good speech, and he has repeated many of those sentiments today. It is important that the issue of food security be raised in the agenda and that it be implanted more solidly in the minds of all Australians.

We live in a country where a shortage of food has not been an issue for 100 years or more. We take it for granted. Our definition of a shortage of food is when there are a limited number of choices of brands on the supermarket shelves. It was almost a national food catastrophe when we could not get bananas for some months. We have become so accustomed to being able to buy whatever we want and at really low prices. I know we all complain about the prices in the supermarket going up, but by world standards, and by comparison with other things that we buy, food in Australia has been at a very low cost. We have just assumed that there will always be sufficient food for us and, indeed, enough to send to other parts of the world. To this day we still export around two-thirds of everything that we produce in this country. Australia is an abundant country with great capabilities and we have had a very progressive agricultural sector that has been able to perform very well.

I note that the minister is going to Rome, and I wish him an enjoyable visit to the Food and Agriculture Organisation and trust that he will be conveying this message to that forum. I note also his desire to continue the campaign that Australia has been waging for a decade or more to upgrade governance and make the FAO work. It clearly has been an underperformer, and when he goes to Rome he will see the great contrasts in the way in which that organisation operates. He will see quite large delegations from starving countries meeting in a lavish forum with all the pomp and ceremony. One wonders whether some of that money would be better spent on actually delivering food to some of the people in those communities. But I think it is important that there is a regular discussion between leaders and nations about how we can deliver and better share the world’s food resources.

Of course, the current discussion about the availability of food is in a sense replicating something that happened in the 1960s. There was a real concern in the 1960s that the world would be short of food. And then the green revolution came—essentially the development of hybridisation—and there were remarkable advances in farm productivity. Therefore, the concerns that people felt at that time were largely erased by new advances in science. Now we face those concerns again, and I was particularly pleased to note in the minister’s speech his recognition of the fact that there is now another potential breakthrough in technology that can take the world through this current crisis—genetically modified organisms. It has been appalling that in this country we have held back on implementing what science has been able to deliver. The state based moratoriums have been a disgrace and have effectively allowed other farm economies around the world to leap ahead of us in their technology. Countries that have not had the advantages of the green revolution, because hybridisation requires comparatively expensive seed and some skills to effectively take advantage of it, are the ones that will benefit particularly from GMOs, because the plants can be adapted to meet their village needs and, in fact, to reproduce year after year without the need to go back to more expensive seed bases.

It has been disappointing that some organisations, even the FAO, have been trying to persuade some of the poorest countries in the world that they should not embrace this technology because somehow or other it may have adverse side effects. Yes, we need to test all science and all technology, and we have very, very rigorous scrutiny arrangements in Australia that all consumers can have confidence in. So there is the real opportunity to be able to take this next step if we are prepared to embrace the technology. I welcome the fact that some of the states seem to now be prepared to relax their GMO ban. All should follow suit so that we can make sure that Australia can continue to contribute as a major world supplier.

The minister was also right to make the observation that current suggestions that the US’s push towards biofuels is responsible for higher food prices are simply an illusion. The reality is that biofuels fit quite well into the food production cycle because often the grain or whatever is used as the base can be used a second time for another productive purpose, and so it can be complementary rather than competitive. He was also right to demonstrate the fact that the demand for food is being driven by higher living standards around the world. People want more choice. They have tasted different foods from other parts of the world, they have more disposable money and they want to use that on good food. Therefore, there is a particularly important role to ensure that we are able to meet those requirements. So I commend the minister on the statement he made today and particularly on his commitment to seek to ensure that Australia is able to play its part in supplying food to the world.

I know that he will be having some battles in cabinet at present, but to effectively carry this through we cannot continue the practice of taking significant areas of agricultural production out of the task. Decisions like the purchase of Toorale Station near Bourke will effectively put out of production a very significant area of farmland. Those sorts of things have implications if you are serious about food security. The land was purchased, without the minister having seen it, essentially for the purpose of putting extra water into the Murray-Darling system—water that is not there because of the drought.

But even when water does return this will mean a permanent loss of productivity from that property, and indeed others. This was a well-run, 150-year-old station. It will now run wild. There is no plan to control the pests and weeds and therefore it is likely to be a bad neighbour to other farmers rather than a good neighbour. This area had the potential to produce significant quantities of food in good seasons. I am indebted to the shadow minister for the environment, who made the point that this particular property was producing about 8,000 tonnes of wheat, 2½ thousand tonnes of sorghum and 1,250 tonnes of maize, and it has been estimated that that property alone was capable of feeding 80,000 to 100,000 people. We cannot keep taking properties out of production and expect to meet our obligations to provide food to the world. The same applies to all buybacks that are occurring within the river system at the present time. If these properties become unproductive, they will be out of the food cycle forever. Whilst we have environmental priorities, if food security is a genuine priority for this country—as it should be—then we must keep our prime agricultural properties in production.

There are a couple of other comments that I would like to make to the minister. The minister referred in his speech to the CSIRO—and it is certainly one of the world’s premier research organisations, with a proud record especially in plant and animal science. In the last budget the government took $60 million from the CSIRO’s budget. As a result it has closed a number of research stations, including the horticultural research laboratory in Merbein in Victoria. Not only will that mean that 30 agricultural scientists will lose their jobs, but also it is a direct hit on the research being done to improve horticultural crops and in particular to deal with climate change issues. The New South Wales state government was no better. It closed eight agricultural research stations in the minibudget yesterday. It will take years for this loss of research and development to have a direct impact on food security in Australia, because we have a lot to spare. But it will have an effect and it will have an effect on breakthroughs that might otherwise have occurred.

So with the best will in the world I encourage the minister to redouble his efforts with his colleagues in cabinet and to remember when decisions are made that are important for the environment that food security is important as well. It is nice to be planting trees all over the place but if they substitute for productive farms then we might have a cool planet but no food to eat. So both priorities have to be taken into account.

Australian farmers have demonstrated a great capacity to adjust. When difficult circumstances come they are able to develop new farming techniques and new systems to make a world of difference. The single biggest recent impact on food production in Australia was probably the development of no-till farming. It was not done for environmental reasons at the time; it was done essentially because fuel was too expensive and people found another way in which they could farm productively. But it has meant that we are able to grow crops in times when the weather is not favourable, and it has made a huge difference both environmentally and productively in a lot of Australia’s farmland. So we can make those adjustments.

But farmers in the future may also need to move to areas where there is more rain and more water, and governments are going to have to find a way to facilitate that kind of movement. We must be prepared to support migration in agriculture and to open up new agricultural areas, particularly if some of those that have been in the traditional food bowl of Australia are no longer able to be viable because of changes in the climate. We cannot afford to let green tape and red tape and black tape and whatever other tape there might be hold up those kinds of developments. If we are going to deal with climate change and not have a food shortage, then we certainly have got to be prepared to be adaptive. If we do not allow that sort of thing to happen, we should not blame the climate for a loss of food supply. To blame will be governments for inactivity or an unwillingness to take the tough decisions. Let us not have a government-induced food security crisis. Let us work together constructively to find ways to continue to boost our productivity and be prepared to be innovative, recognising that that will mean some compromises in various places. I have great confidence in Australia’s capacity to continue to feed our population and those in other parts of the world in the years ahead. I commend the minister for his vision of the way in which that will happen and ask him to redouble his efforts to ensure that his cabinet colleagues see the wisdom of his comments.

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