Food & Farming

David Tribe writing about the latest issue of the Australian Farm Policy Journal and quoting Executive Director Mick Keogh notes there has been little real growth in total annual agricultural research and development investment levels in Australia since the 1980s, and the level of government investment in agricultural research and development is falling.

“Given the extended lag times that are known to occur between agricultural R&D investment and subsequent farm productivity growth, this raises doubts about the ability of Australian farmers to maintain the high levels of productivity growth in the future that will be necessary to remain competitive in global markets,” Mr Keogh said.

The focus on production research has been replaced to some extent with a greater emphasis being placed on environmental issues.

Hi Jennifer,

Attached is a recent speech from Greg Bourne in which he said:

“We now know, for example, that the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the other great Asian rivers are likely to disappear within 40 years due to the warming of the planet.

If these rivers dry up during the irrigation season, then the rice production which currently feeds over one third of humanity collapses and the world goes into net food deficit.”

Is he being over-dramatic? Perhaps you would like to mention it in your blog.

Regards Anon.

Attached: download speech by Greg Bourne (CEO of WWF) by clicking anywhere here.

Australian farmers could soon be selling their environmental management services to the public, such as fencing riparian zones, according to Farm Online.

I am not sure how fencing a riparian zone could be seen as selling an environmental service to the public? Do they mean the public will pay to have the riparian area fenced?

Apparently Agriculture Minister Peter McGauran is finalizing a new system for “stewardship payments” to farmers.

The federal government’s Agriculture and Food Policy Reference Group recently released a report titled Creating Our Future:Agriculture and Food Policy for the Next Generation that recommended government support a new market based program for the delivery of environmental services including a system that:

1. Operates nationally, but be administered at a regional or sub-regional level to target areas of higher conservation value

2. Allow a range of purchasers to participate (such as philanthropic conservation groups or private companies), although governments will be the main purchasers through, for example, a successor program to the NHT and NAP

3. Be equitable and allow landholders to bid competitively for funding on a basis that reflects the marginal value of maintaining land in its current use and the direct cost of conservation measures (such as fencing and maintenance of the area being conserved)

4. Have clear objectives and targets, with funding decisions based on an assessment of the environmental benefit relative to the price tendered

5. Be efficient to run with low transaction costs.

According to a CSIRO “news flash” on 8th August last year, auction-based systems are the most cost effective mechanism for distributing funds to private landholders to improve water quality and biodiversity on private land. This recommendation was based on a trial conducted by CSIRO and the Onkaparinga Catchment Water.

The more tradition method is by ‘devolved grant’ schemes.

Pressure for a new mechanism follows recognition that the state-based vegetation management laws are costing farmers a lot of money.

The financial cost was the focus of a paper delivered at this year’s ABARE Outlook conference in Canberra. The study by Lisa Elliston reported that native vegetation legislation in central and western New South Wales alone would cost the economy A$1.1 billion in today’s terms over a 15 year period.

And just yesterday, according to ABC Online, the Queensland government released its new draft guidelines for the assessment of tree clearing applications for thinning and weed control.

The European Union spends about A$5.6 billion a year on schemes aimed at encouraging less-intensive farming in order to increase biodiversity, improve water quality etcetera on farm. But it has delivered very little tangible environmental benefit according to a recent news feature in Nature by John Whitfield titled ‘How green was my subsidy’.

One of the problems according to the feature article is that “most of Europe’s agi-environmental schemes have very vague goals.”

And sometimes research results indicate that wildlife is not adverse to a bit of farming. For example, one of the first scientific audits of an agri-environment scheme, showed that in Holland a project intended to help ground-nesting meadow birds by delaying the mowing of fields was having no effect – in this region some birds actually seemed to prefer intensively farmed fields.

David Kleijn, an ecologist from Wageningen University in Holland, has spearheaded the research effort to document the benefits in a rigorous way.

This work has concluded that:

“Plants showed the most widespread benefits, with higher diversity on scheme fields in
every country except the Netherlands. Bees benefited in Germany and Switzerland, grasshoppers and crickets in Britain, and spiders in Spain. In cases where the biodiversity went up, nearly all the beneficiaries were common species; only one scheme – a Spanish programme aimed at making arable fields bird-friendly by leaving winter stubble – showed a positive effect on endangered species, one of which was the thekla lark (Galerida theklae).”

The Nature news feature article really emphasis the extent to which Europeans like to mix their nature and farming with the conclusion:

“Such schemes may not be the best way to promote the preservation of endangered species. … Europe might do better to allow some areas to revert to a state close to wilderness while others are intensively farmed, and then to manage the whole system so as to maximize leisure, flood protection, and water quality.

… biodiversity benefits would accrue even if not particularly targeted. But Europeans like farmland landscapes, and will probably continue to try and convince themselves that there are practical ways to keep areas that are rich in wildlife and pleasing to the eye, which also produce cheap food and don

I would like to think that Australia’s national broadcaster would take-to-task an American who writes a best selling book that is full of factual errors that denigrate Australia. But instead our ABC just keeps giving him more time on radio to tell his tall tales.

Professor Jared Diamond got a great run on ABC radio last June when he was over here promoting his new book ‘Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive’. Then Robyn Williams ran him again on The Science Show a few months later and for a whole hour.

I complained and was given 15 minutes on Ockham’s Razor last November.

I have reviewed his chapter on Australia and shown it to be full of factual errors, click here for the published paper and I list some of the errors at the end of this blog post.

Michael Duffy invited Professor Diamond to debate me on Duffy’s ABC radio program Counterpoint a couple of weeks ago, but the professor declined.

So the ABC gave him a wad of time last Thursday night, again on a Robyn Williams program, In Conversation. Click here for the transcript.

While the program was billed as putting the professor on the spot – it was anything but a tough interview. Indeed Diamond was given more opportunity to tell more tall tales.

These included that unless we change our ways there won’t be any tropical rainforests left in Australia in 30 years time. That’s right – read the transcript!

He also thought it relevant to make the point that “Australia is the first-world country that has the smallest fraction of its land area covered by old-growth forest.” I thought we were also the driest continent on earth after the Antarctic so how relevant is that statistic? Should we turn our coastal rivers inland so that we can grow forest were there is now desert?

He goes on to state that Japan has a much larger percentage of its land mass as old growth forest. I would guess – and perhaps a reader of this blog might do the relevant calculations – that we have a much larger total area of old growth forest than Japan?

And I can’t believe the following claim but would like more information. He said in the interview last Thursday night that:

“Farmers are bringing pressure to bear on other farmers. Again on my last visit to Australia I had a very interesting time with a farmer in South Australia who was telling me that if a farmer who either leases land, or owns land outright is not taking good care of the land for example by over-stocking it, then local farmers put pressure on that farmer to change his or her practices. And in extreme cases my farmer-friend told me, if a farmer continues to abuse his or her land then even if you own it outright your land may be confiscated.”

Can anybody tell me as a comment below, or by separate email, whether there could be any truth in this claim that freehold land can be confiscated in South Australia?

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Just a few of the errors:

In the book the professor gets the price of wood chip wrong suggesting we sell it to Japan for US$7 per ton when official statistics show it sells for A$151 per tonne.

He indicates Australian farmers produce less food on a tonnes per hectare basis than most of the rest of the world, but doesn’t specify which crops. If we consider some of our major crops including cotton and rice – well Australian farmers harvest much more than the world average on a tonnes per hectare basis.

We produce on average 7 tonnes of rice per hectare in Australia while the world average is 4 tonnes/ha and Australian rice growers use 50 percent less water for every kilo of rice produced than the world average. In Australia the average yield for cotton is 1,672 tonnes/ha, while the world average is just 638 tonnes/ha – a lot less.

One of the reasons we manage to produce so more cotton per hectare is because our cotton is all irrigated. This is a reason why we don’t produce so much wheat per hectare. We grow a lot of wheat in Australia, but it is not irrigated, so our yields are low relative to much of the rest of the world.

In the book published by Penguin, Professor Diamond claims that, “it is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice concentrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees.” Yet official statistics show Australia exports almost three times the quantity of citrus it imports. During the 2003/04 financial year Australian producers exported navel and valencia oranges worth A$107 million.

Indeed, contrary to the impression give by the professor, Australia exports most of the food it produces with crop exports valued at A$13,269 million in 2003/04.

In ‘Collapse’ Diamond states that Australians are cutting down too many trees and as a consequence Australia’s forests will disappear long before our coal and iron reserves. Some forests have been clearfelled, some have been selectively logged, most have regrown. The area of forest is increasing, not reducing. The area of old growth forest protected nationally has increased from 1.2 million hectares to 3.8 millionh hectares since 1996. Tasmania has 43 percent of its total land are protected in reserves, including 82 percent of its rainforest.