John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too take this opportunity to congratulate you on your elevation to high office. You will be a magnificent Second Deputy Speaker and I hope one day you are the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Recent developments in Europe and the United States could revolutionise the production of meat and animal products even as the Australian livestock industry struggles to contain public outrage at the cruelty of the live export trade. Scientists have made good progress in producing meat and leather by tissue culture, where sections of animal hide and muscles are grown in a nutrient solution and then processed to produce substances that are indistinguishable in appearance and other properties from meat and leather taken from slaughtered animals. Researchers at the universities of Oxford and Amsterdam found that, for the same weight of product, cultured product expends seven to 45 per cent less energy than conventional farming methods, produces 78 to 96 per cent fewer greenhouse gas emissions, uses 99 per cent less land and needs 82 to 96 per cent less water depending on the meat types they compared.

In the United States the technology start-up company Modern Meadow announced in August that by 2017 they will start to produce leather by tissue culture while they continue to work on growing meat in the laboratory. The prospect that cultured animal products may displace a significant part of the produce of the meat and livestock industry is not just a dream but a real possibility given the obvious advantages in a world facing an ever-growing demand for animal products from an industry increasingly constrained by environmental limitations. According to the US Department of Agriculture in 2011, the world consumed 55 million tonnes of beef and veal and 100 million tonnes of pork and this will double by 2050. Supplying even a proportion of that demand will place a great burden on the environment and use vast amounts of energy and non-renewable resources while the slaughter of animals continues to raise very understandable concerns about animal welfare.

According to the business information provider MarketLine, the international meat, fish and poultry market generated revenues of $527.6 billion in 2010 and had a compound annual growth rate of 3.8 per cent for 2006-10—good news in the short-term for the Australian livestock industry but even more encouraging for the producers of cultured animal products.

These technological changes will have an adverse impact on people working in some rural industries yet the meat factories, if I may call them that, will still need agricultural products to feed the bio reactors, will still need workers and will, one hopes, provide well-paid jobs that do not entail the unpleasantness and frequent cruelty that goes with the slaughter of animals for food and hides.