Feeding a hungry world – Australia’s responsibility and opportunities

Tuesday, 15 November 2011 — Global Foundation National Conference, “Feeding a hungry world – Australia’s responsibility and opportunities – Can Australia treble food production” Shepparton

It is a pleasure to be in Shepparton today and have the opportunity to speak to you on behalf of the Federal Opposition. I am also delighted to represent the Leader of the Opposition, who, as you may be aware, is visiting our troops in Afghanistan. I acknowledge my parliamentary colleague, the Federal Member for Murray, Dr Sharman Stone.

The theme of your conference, ‘Feeding a hungry world’ is very timely indeed.  In particular, the theme of this panel discussion, “Can Australia treble food production” is something the Coalition already looking at closely.

As you are no doubt aware, Shepparton is one of Australia’s major food bowls.  Shepparton’s agriculture has served as a food bowl for Australia for nearly 100 years. Shepparton relies on growing magnificent, clean, green food. Much of that food, dairy or fruit products, meats, cereals and oil seeds, is manufactured locally and much of it is exported.

Having grown up on a farm, and having extended family in this region, I appreciate some of the issues facing the sector.

It is a critical time for agriculture: with the world population expected to grow to 9 billion by 2050 and the OECD and United Nations predicting a 40 per cent rise in food prices by 2020, agriculture is destined for a renewed period of global significance.

I would like to briefly address three issues that the Coalition is currently examining. This is not an exhaustive list of the relevant issues before us. For example, Anthony Pratt mentioned the need to review anti-dumping laws in his opening address. This is a topic about which the Coalition recently released policies that will assist this sector.

The three issues that I will mention – research and development, water storage and dams, and biosecurity – in part address the two issues raised by Steve Howard in his opening remarks, namely, how we increase production, and how we value-add in Australia.

Future food security issues have governments around the world thinking about agricultural industries with renewed importance. The Coalition takes the issue of food security very seriously – not just for our own needs, but realising the opportunity that presents itself to feed, as I mentioned, an ever growing global population.

Research and development

Improving productivity will be a key driver from government and industry to respond to food security challenges and it is our belief that R&D is the key ingredient to this.

Productivity growth in Australian agriculture has been high, at around 2.2 per cent over the past 30 years.

However drought, natural disasters and declining investment in R&D have reduced this in recent years.

There is extensive literature on the importance of R&D. At a time when our domestic productivity growth has flattened out we need to be redoubling our efforts in R&D. Industry are best placed to efficiently utilise R&D funds.

Australia has a public private partnership model which is the envy of the world and we should be building on this not reducing it.  We must continue to innovate and continue to push the boundaries and producers have an important role to play.

This will keep us at the forefront of food production; Australian producers must continue to remain the cleanest, greenest and most efficient in the world.  The quality of our product is why Australian agricultural produce are the most sought after in the world. We don’t apologise for wanting to maintain that.

Coalition dams taskgroup

You may be aware that Tony Abbott earlier this year set up a taskgroup led by Andrew Robb MP to work on and develop a dams policy to take to the next election.

Managed the right way, a dam is a flood mitigation device, a potential provider of zero emissions power, and a source of environmental flows in dry times as well as means of better water security for farmers.

The role of government will be to ensure that the planning requirements are not onerous, that it doesn’t collapse under the weight of regulation.  If major projects are identified, state and federal governments should work closely together to deliver the project and fast-track approval procedures.

There needs to be a culture of development and backing our strengths.

Biosecurity

Biosecurity plays an integral part in ensuring we continue to remain amongst the best producers in the world. It is a vital ingredient for maintaining our food security into the future is robust biosecurity and quarantine arrangements.

We are fortunate that we are geographically isolated, and we have had good quarantine systems in the past.

Labor commissioned the Beale Quarantine and Biosecurity Review (which called for hundreds of millions to be spent on AQIS and Quarantine annually) and then spent the next four years running it down and stripping out its assets.

Labor’s 2009 Federal Budget slashed $58 million from the Customs budget, leading to 4.7 million less air cargo consignments being inspected each year and 2150 less vessels being boarded on arrival.

Labor’s 2011 Federal Budget slashed $33.4 million in funding to CRC’s, meaning again less money for research and development, less money going towards finding ways in which to improve our herds or make more efficient and higher yielding crops, less money to help our agricultural industries stay at the forefront of innovation.

Under Labor, science is taking a backseat. For example, ignoring the Myrtle Rust and Asian bee incursions are two recent cases in point.

The irony is that the Myrtle Rust threatens to cut our carbon stores by a much larger scale than any carbon tax would benefit our carbon stores.  So for the sake of spending a few million dollars they could have had a greater impact than tens of billions of dollars in a carbon tax.

Opportunities and challenges

Agricultural production in this country drives $155 billion-a-year in economic production (over 12% of GDP), generating around 1.6 million Australian jobs and $32 billion-a-year in farm exports.

At the height of the global financial crisis, it was our farm economy that also kept this nation out of recession – recording double-digit growth while other sectors languished in negative territory.

So we face major challenges for food security in the future but also there are many opportunities and I know that farmers are up to the challenge. From a political stance, Governments need to facilitate a productive, sustainable industry and not get in the way by creating more red tape.

Increasing Australia’s food production requires a lot of work from many policy fronts – and in the short time I have had, I have only outlined several of them.  I am happy to expand on these and related subjects in the panel discussion. The Coalition have recognised the work required, and just like we did in Government, we continue to stand up for farmers and the regional communities they support.

We must first ensure that we secure our own food requirements into the future and not allow the agricultural sector to decline.  There are real opportunities in the future for Australia to feed the world, however that work needs to start now so that Australia is best suited to fill the ‘food’ gap in the years ahead.

This conference is an important step in this crucial task.

We wish you all the best for this conference; we look forward to the outcome of your deliberations; and we expect to be able to continue to work with you in the years ahead in achieving our common goals.

Ends.