Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

will go to their beds hungry. I thank Senator Bilyk, because on this day when I am celebrating the birth of my first grandchild—a grandson—I should reflect on the fact that, of those one billion people, two-thirds are in our own region. It is little wonder that the first of the millennium aspirational development goals was to halve hunger by 50 per cent by the year 2015. Regrettably, we are falling way short of that target. I will refer again later in my speech to the fact that a hungry man is an angry man, and, when an angry man sees his family devastated by hunger, he wants to take that anger one stage further.

How do we define the need for food security? It involves universal and sustained physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food and water to meet dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy lifestyle. A very wide range of issues are involved in food security, some of which I will canvass this evening. For example, there is: sustainability; the environment; poverty, which is often brought about by illiteracy, by poor access to education or by the extremely limited non-agricultural income opportunities available in so many developing countries; social support; labour conditions in rural communities; diminishing agricultural research and extension capacity, which we see in this country as so many agencies depart the scene; transport infrastructure; international and communal security; access to capital; and confidence in international trade.

Not only are there one billion people going hungry tonight; the expectation is that 1.9 billion more people in our region alone by 2050 will go hungry. Australia of course has an obligation as well as an opportunity, in my view, to assist in solving the problem of hunger in our region. Naturally, the problem is not only in the increasing populations of so many areas of Asia but also in the fact that in parts of that continent—China, for example—there is a movement now from rural communities to urban communities and that these populations, as their socioeconomic status improves, move from staple foods to higher-quality protein and other foods. The challenges for us and for governments like ours, for food producers, and consumers for that matter, are complex. You have heard me say before that in this country, as in others, there is a decreased availability of arable land for food production, in competition with urban sprawl, erosion, salinity and so on. We know that across the world there is reduced access to the supply of water. The Chinese themselves have 25 per cent less water available for agricultural production now than they did 25 years ago.

We see changes to the climate. We see less fuel being available to operate machinery required for agricultural practices. We see decreased access now to fertilisers, to pesticides, to herbicides, which may impact adversely on the environment. We see increased competition for finance in this country, where the banks are saying, 'Agricultural investment is risky and we must be allocating in areas of lower risk.' And the added functionality in this country is an ageing population of farmers. We now have the average age of farmers in this country at 61 years. I was in Japan recently with Senator Bilyk, Ms Janelle Saffin and Mr John Forrest, where we learnt that the average age of farmers and their spouses in Japan now is actually 67 years, so there is an ageing population.

There are two issues here: agricultural yields over time have increased. We in Australia quite proudly saw our agricultural productivity increase about 2.8 per cent per annum from the mid-70s through the middle of the last decade. It was probably leading the world. We are now down to one per cent increase in productivity per annum and that is a dangerous position to find ourselves in.

But what are we talking about here? Are we talking about availability of food or are we talking about accessibility to food? In fact the point is made quite often that there is food available to feed those we have now and those who will come ahead of us into the future. So what governs availability? We are talking often about issues on the farm itself—soil factors including the physical properties of soil, the texture et cetera. We are talking about plant factors including species, genetic improvements and variability, and of course biosecurity issues. There are climatic factors including moisture supply, temperature, solar radiation, the sorts of issues that are going to impact on both plant growth and soil quality. And then there are the socioeconomic factors associated with agricultural inputs and products—farm incomes are, in the main, deteriorating not only in this country but also in developing countries—and the infrastructure required.

What I would like to do for a moment though, is to focus not on availability of food as much as accessibility to food. Of course this is the ability to access adequate food supplies on a sustained basis. The basic cause of chronic malnourishment in the developing world is not the lack of availability of food but the fact that it cannot get to the people who need it at a cost that they can afford. Only today in fact, in terms of access to food, the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, announced that the US are now willing to supply 250 million tons of food to North Korea in return for issues associated with their nuclear proliferation. There is an absolute example on this very day of the question I speak of: accessibility to food. Security of course is an issue.

Economics is another issue. If the food is there but people cannot afford to buy it or cannot afford to source it, then of course we have an issue. That takes us—though time does not permit—into the whole question of the growth of food stuffs for use in biofuel production when in fact those same products may be able to be used in the food chain. Whilst that is a very complex issue, it is one that we must address.

The question of logistics is yet another issue. I spent much of the last decade in India only to learn that wastage of up to 25 or even 30 per cent occurred in the transport logistics of foodstuffs between the time they arrived at Indian ports to the time they actually got to the end-consumers. Part of that was due to theft; part of it was corruption; part of it was vermin; part of it was spoilage, and on the list goes. The area in which I was involved, in fact, was corruption of bulk fuel, where people would steal parts of the fuel and adulterate it with water so that by the time it got to the end-consumer obviously it was not the product that they thought they were buying.

I was only then to learn that our technology would have application in the milk transport logistics chain. Milk leaving in bulk carriers from the north of India was adulterated with water by the time it got to the markets in the middle and the south of India. It was actually stolen and replaced with water on the way. These are the sorts of issues that I speak of.

So the question then of availability does not necessarily address the problems of food security. I made mention of North Korea today in terms of security. We speak of the Arab spring, but it is little understood that most of the catalyst for the Arab spring that we have seen over the last 12 months and in Syria today is due to the lack of available food. So these are the circumstances we see occurring. Can we imagine what is going on in those cities like Homs and the others with all that deprivation? How are people being fed? You can see why a hungry person becomes an angry person and the profound effect that has on security.

Time does not permit me to go into what Australia is doing and has done and will do into the future, except to say that we have a very enviable reputation when it comes to our involvement in developing countries in our region. All I can do is recommend to the chamber, and to those who might be listening, the excellent text by Julian Cribb, an Australian scientist. The title is The Coming Famine: the global food crisis and what we can do to avoid it. It is printed by the University of California Press and I believe it is compulsory reading for those of us in this chamber.

Senate adjourned at 19:29