Archives for October 2006

What will Australian farmers be growing in 5- 10 years time?

I watched Part 3 of Two Men in a Tinnie * on ABC TV last night. It’s about environmentalist Tim Flannery and TV personality John Doyle motoring down the Darling and Murray Rivers in a small aluminum boat.

They have met lots of people along the river but haven’t yet interviewed a rice or cotton farmer while often complaining about these crops. In Parts 1 and 2 they reminisced about the days when farmers grew sheep rather than cotton.

A couple of years ago I wrote that:

“It is [Peter] Cullen’s contention that we can save water in the Murray–Darling Basin by growing higher value crops, in particular wine grapes. And there are those who insist that rice growing should be banned altogether. While concerned greens may be keen to sip champagne for breakfast, rather than crunch rice bubbles—all in the name of doing the right thing by the environment— is this really a sustainable approach?”

I went on to explain in that article that…

“One of the most defining characteristics of water in the Australian landscape is flow variability. In the poem ‘My Country’, Dorothea McKellar appropriately describes Australia as a land ‘of drought and flooding rains’. Reflecting this variability, water allocation can be severely restricted in drought years like the present, even though water storage capacity in the Murray Darling Basin is approximately 25 per cent of annual average runoff.

Paradoxically, rice growers easily cope with this by simply not planting a crop. In contrast, South Australian wine grape growers bleat loudly because their perennial crop needs water every year.”

Just yesterday I read Rabobank bank boss, Bert Heemskerk, stating that northern hemisphere farm subsidies ‘have to go’ and that this would lead to lead to an inevitable shift in global agricultural production from the northern hemisphere to the south.

The Pharmland website also suggests that Europe, in particular that Denmark, should lessen its dependence on massive EU agricultural subsidies and fostered a freer global market, allowing Third World countries to enter the market and begin self-sustaining economies. The site goes on to suggest that Denmark farmers begin to cultivate high value GM crops including vaccine-laden tomatoes.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the potential increased production of low value GM crops for ethanol.

David Tribe wrote in the IPA Review last year that:

“Already, Brazilian fuel ethanol has become a substantial part of international trade, and currently competes commercially on US fuel markets, even with the penalty of a 51 per cent US excise tax. This dominant global trade position in ethanol liquid-fuel capitalises on 30 years of previous technological improvement, including earlier introduction of higher yielding cane varieties and numerous integrated changes to ethanol factories.

The recent wave of ethanol fuel ventures in Australia cannot afford to ignore the reality of markets dominated by very cheap Brazilian ethanol and the prospects of even lower priced Brazilian and US ethanol in the near future.

Cereal straw and sugar cane bagasse are not the only cellulosic starting materials which can be converted to sugar using enzyme catalysts: wood and many other non-food crops can also be used, and forest industries in Canada and Scandinavia have particular interests in this area.

…Ethanol biofuel doesn’t make economic or environmental sense without the tools and discoveries of modern biotechnology.

Without this, Australia would be better off importing its fuel ethanol from South America.

Setbacks to farm profitability and investment caused by GM crop bans show that technological leadership entails much more than just science and the costing of economic returns and agronomic benefits. They represent destruction of basic economic freedoms and threats to the medium term financial viability of several rural industries. Resolution of this damage might come from a frank assessment of the misjudgements of industry, farming groups, and politicians that caused them, as well as an action plan to change stakeholder strategies.

If it is indeed true that they were driven by political calculations about urban votes rather than government attention to the interests of the rural sector, stronger activism by farming organizations, such as the National Farmers Federation and other networks such as the recently established Producers Forum (which is a loose national network of concerned growers), are a very welcome sign.”

But not everyone is so optimistic. Last week I received an email from Aaron Edmonds with a link to a piece in The Daily Star that began:

“The Furnace Australia sailed into Chennai recently carrying a load of wheat and, some warned, ill tidings. India’s first wheat imports in six years marked a reversal in the march toward “food independence” that the country began in the 1970s.

In the piece Jason Overdorf goes on to suggest that Indian agriculture is in trouble, too reliant on technology and running out of water:

“Swaminathan urges leaders to focus on what he calls an ‘evergreen revolution’. The goal would be to correct the damage wrought by the first Green Revolution: adopting new methods like the use of natural predators instead of chemicals to eliminate pests, and switching to organic fertilizers and more efficient drip irrigation. He also says Singh should promote crops that require less water, including native Indian grains such as finger millet (ragi), pearl millet (bajra) and sorghum (jowar).

That’s a tough sell for two reasons: these coarse grains, once a staple of regional Indian cuisines, have fallen out of style since the first Green Revolution made wheat cheap and plentiful. So restoring their popularity will take a major marketing push, of the kind governments rarely do well. Second, Singh sees India very differently from the critics, as a nation fighting to attain middle-class comfort, not one at risk of sliding into mass hunger. Watch the future voyages of the Furnace Australia, and whether it is carrying grain to India, for one strong sign of which view is right.

But i’ts hard for me to reconcile the claim that Indian agriculture is in trouble with reports that cotton yields are up?

Indeed world cotton production is projected at 25 million tons in 2006/07 with China (Mainland), India and Pakistan combined expected to produce 13 million tons in 2006/07, or over half of world production for the first time in history.

Again, according to David Tribe in that piece from last year’s IPA Review:

“Modern plant breeding is playing decisive role in this economically disruptive but beneficial-to-the consumer transition. The continuing global progress with this revolution, which started in Australia and the US in 1996, is illustrated by recent comments made by Zhang Rui, a member of a research team in the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. In September this year, he announced that China has approved commercialization of a new hybrid variety of insect-resistant Bt cotton—which contains a protein that kills bollworms—that should yield 26 per cent more cotton. The last two seasons have also witnessed truly dramatic improvements in the
Indian cotton industry productivity.

Widespread use of genetically modified cotton seeds has helped assure India of a bumper 2005 cotton harvest, with national output estimated at 25 million bales, up seven per cent from 2004.”

Back to that original question: What will Australian farmers be growing in 5- 10 years time?

Will the demand for ethanol (in Australia and overseas), lifting of the bans on GM food crops, lifting of agricultural subsidies in Europe, relative competitiveness of Asian farmers, or the availablility and price of water, be the most significant drivers of change?

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* I’ve noted Luke’s request that I comment on this series. I’m working up to a long blog post pointing out the difference between the rhetoric and the imagery.