Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to support in principle this motion on global food and water security put forward by the member for Oxley. This motion was obviously written before the climate change summit in Copenhagen last year, so I will forgive my colleague for his vain hope that there would be some significant outcome from that talkfest. However, I do acknowledge that the United Nations have on their agenda the issue of global food security.

We are very much on the verge of a global food crisis, if we are not already in the midst of it. Last year, rising food prices were the basis of violent riots in Haiti, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Senegal. At the moment, global food production cannot meet global demands. This is the challenge that we face: trying to feed an increasing global population so as to avoid riots, which could tragically lead ultimately to war. We are trying to do this in the face of rapidly diminishing arable farming lands. By 2050, most of the world will be urbanised. By 2025, there will be around 30 megacities with populations of more than 10 million each. To feed the population in these megacities and the projected global population of around nine billion people by 2050, food production will have to increase by 70 per cent globally. By 2030, global demand for meat will increase by around 80 per cent. There will be more mouths to feed but fewer farmers to meet the challenge.

In Australia it is expected that we will have a population of around 35 million by 2050. Our farmers contribute to feeding over 60 million people a day, so we are not only well placed to feed ourselves but we are also in a position to feed the world. To do this we must ensure that our farmers are given enough support from government, consumers and industry. Yet at the moment farmers across the nation are facing their biggest challenge: encroachment on their land by urbanisation and mining. More than 80 per cent of Queensland’s land is in some way affected by resources exploration, exploitation or excavation. For the past few years farmers have suffered uncertainty in the face of the mining giant, but they have certainly not laid down without a fight and I have been with them in this fight. They have strongly and rightly called for the assurance that the state’s prime agricultural lands will be protected from the threat of urbanisation and mining.

I support my colleague when he calls on the House to support policies, projects and programs that deliver long-term solutions for food security as a means of reducing poverty and achieving sustainable development. However, we cannot help others if we do not help ourselves. That is why it is important that we find the right balance between protecting our productive agricultural lands and harnessing our fossil fuel resources. I was pleased to learn that recently the Queensland government has finally listened to the concerns of the state’s producers and our vital food and fibre producers. It has released a policy and planning framework discussion paper on conserving and managing Queensland’s strategic cropping land. This has been a long time coming. I have been calling for progress like this since I organised and hosted a ‘meeting of the minds’ forum between farmers and mining groups almost two years ago in my electorate of Maranoa.

Nevertheless, I welcome this paper, as have many of the farming community groups in Queensland, and I will certainly be putting a submission to the strategy. I agree with the paper on the strategic cropping land proposal when it says that they have to ‘protect such land from those developments that would lead to its permanent alienation or diminished productivity’. With only two per cent of Queensland classified as cropping land, I do not think it is a big task to ask the Queensland government to ensure our prime arable lands can continue to provide a vital source of food and fibre for the state, the nation and the world. We protect national parks; we protect the Barrier Reef; it is time that we protected our prime agricultural food resource: arable lands in this country, not just in the state of Queensland.

We must also make sure that our governments and our parliament are open to the highly supportive and new technologies which increase our yield, and I read a disturbing newspaper article recently which talked of some of Australia’s top chefs signing to an anti-GM agreement last year. The author rightly pointed out that these chefs are in a privileged position of being able to access some of Australia’s finest organically grown foods, yet across the ocean there are more than a billion undernourished people—(Time expired)

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