Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

It is not in your electorate? Well that makes sense. We have heard about the Walgett wheat grower. That explains why I did not get taken there, so I withdraw that. I should mention, as a matter of interest to the House given what was raised—I will not emphasise this, but I will refer to it at the start—the global concerns at the moment about how we can make sure the population of the world is able to feed itself. These are very real, very deep issues, and the member for New England is right: we should not overstate or understate the role that Australia can play. We are part of the answer for some countries, and some countries do rely on us for their food security. But certainly the long-term response to trying to make sure that the population of the world is able to sustain itself with food goes very much to assisting with capacity building in poor countries.

This morning I had the opportunity to meet with my counterpart minister from Eritrea. We were having a discussion in my office only today about how Australia might be able to assist Eritrea with the development of no-till farming. Those discussions, and the issues that the member for New England has brought to the attention of the House today, are very much within the frame of the government for how we can assist some of the poorer nations in the world in adapting to the very real challenges they face. As a simple example: for a port nation like Eritrea, the figures are often put out—I know some people will dispute the figures as to whether you go to the first stage of the production process or further down. Some will quote that 60 per cent of Australian agriculture is being exported. For Eritrea, 60 per cent of their agriculture is provided domestically and 40 per cent of what they need to feed their population is imported.

The issues in this matter of public importance go to, firstly, the adaptation that farmers have to undertake simply because of what is coming at them with climate change and, secondly, how the people working the land are part of the solution in reducing greenhouse emissions. I will deal with each of those two matters in turn. On the first issue of adapting to climate change, when we talk about the impact of climate change on the agricultural sector we usually go to four key areas: dealing with less water through more frequent and deeper droughts; higher temperatures; more major weather events—if anyone knows about those, it is the member for Kennedy, with what has been experienced in his part of the country; and, finally, increased proliferation in pests, disease and weeds. I will go through some of the issues of each of those in turn.

I think we have covered the impacts of longer and deeper droughts in the ministerial statement and the response from the Leader of the Nationals earlier in the debate, and I will not go into that further now. The issue of higher temperatures is real. It is one of the many issues faced by some of the intensive livestock industries. More regular and more intense heatwaves were certainly faced by people involved in horticulture earlier this year, when we had that heatwave in South Australia, which was completely off the scale. If you actually tried to put it on the scale—if you tried to compare it with other heatwaves—you ended up with a one-in-3,000-year weather event. More major weather events are very much of concern for the people in the north of the country. Cyclones have always been devastating. The cyclone that devastated the banana industry in the electorate of Kennedy and in the electorates to the north and the south was an example of what we do expect to see more intensively and more regularly than in the past.

The final issue with climate change, which I do not think is spoken enough about, is the increased proliferation in pests, disease and weeds. Our biosecurity authorities have never been of greater importance to the future of agriculture than they are now. If there was ever a time we needed to make sure that our quarantine and biosecurity services were sufficiently robust, it is in the situation that we now face where pests, diseases and weeds are going to be covering a greater part of our country’s territory than they ever have previously.

Those issues go to the essential aspects of adapting to climate change. As honourable members are well aware, in the Australia’s Farming Future program, $130 million over four years is going to both climate change and productivity research. The Climate Change Adaptation Program will assist farmers adapt and make sure that the best on-farm methods for dealing with what the climate is bringing forward actually make it from the lab to the farm. All too often we have fantastic research, where the research and development is done well, but the demonstration and extension is done poorly. The investment of those agencies involved in developing some great practices which could be adopted on-farm all too often do not make it to the farmer. There will be some people, as they face the reality of the climate, who will reach the point where they simply believe that they need to pursue a life away from agriculture. The Climate Change Adjustment Program will have mechanisms in place to assist in the decision and that adjustment. Ultimately, if the decision is taken, the Rural Financial Counselling Service will assist with the adjustment itself.

The challenge then comes in how we reduce greenhouse gas emissions themselves. I know both the member for New England and the member for Kennedy have often referred to biofuels as being part of the equation for how we may be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions overall. Using the simple example that a fossil fuel if not used remains in the ground, a biofuel if not used will very often deteriorate anyway. There may well be, particularly through the use of cellulose, some methods available, and part of the answer in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is very likely to be found down a biofuels path.

The other issue in reducing greenhouse gas emissions that the member for New England referred to is soil carbon. It goes to no-till farming, to the use of perennial pasture and to best practice farming. This is where we have, in so many ways, the circle completed in the good outcome happening at every step of the equation. No-till farming methods preserve soil moisture, they preserve soil carbon and they lead to a capacity for increased harvest. They go completely against what traditionally had been the belief. For so many centuries the concept of farming was: to prove that the soil was really good quality you had to rip it to shreds. Part of the productivity improvement in areas which have been highly productive, whether it be New England or the WA wheat belt, has been the development and use of these no-till or minimum till methods.

I will disappoint the member for New England in not using his MPI as an opportunity to discuss at length cabinet processes with respect to an emissions-trading scheme, but I certainly can say that the difficulty with soil carbon is precisely as the member for New England described it: we know carbon is being sequestered in the soil, that this is best practice and that the accounting of it is extraordinarily difficult. There is a general public policy principle that, if you are going to count something, you want to be able to count it accurately. That is why, at the ABARE Outlook conference earlier this year, the Prime Minister commissioned me to use some of the money from Australia’s Farming Future—some of that research and development productivity fund—to involve some detailed science in how we can improve the storage of soil carbon and, importantly, how we can improve the accounting mechanisms for soil carbon.

In any trading scheme, if you are going to be able to trade you need to be able to account and measure. The fact that the science of what is going on has not caught up with the measurement of the extent to which it is going on certainly does not preclude the government from investing seriously in trying to get the measurement issues up to speed as quickly as we possibly can.

There is a further, similar concern with respect to livestock emissions. Livestock emissions are easily the largest area of emissions within the area of agriculture, and we have a similar problem here with counting. The accounting mechanisms and the methods that might be available to farmers in order to reduce livestock emissions are not well advanced. Some of the answers may go to methods of feeding, some may go to microbes in the stomach and some may go to breeding, whether it be to breeding stock that have a lower level of emissions or, as may well happen, to breeding animals that simply grow more quickly. If you end up being able to bring an animal to slaughter earlier, you have therefore had an overall reduction in the emissions over the life of that animal. There are a whole lot of possibilities that science is chasing down, and it is important for there to be a serious government contribution to help to leverage further funding in that area. Australia’s Farming Future will do that. As I have previously said publicly but have not had an opportunity to say to the House, the way we will structure the final break-up of that $130 million will leave a good deal more than $15 million for research and development.

Some of this work is also advanced by Caring for our Country. The landcare movement have for years been doing work which is only now being recognised as being of great assistance in reducing the emissions profile of Australian agriculture. It is worth remembering as well—when you see the figures that our emissions are about 108 per cent of 2000 levels—that, were it not for the work done by agriculture in land clearing and natural resource management, we would be looking at 120 per cent, not 108 per cent. It is all too often forgotten and neglected that we have been within our Kyoto targets very much because of the good work done by people working the land, whether through land-clearing specifically or through the landcare movement more generally.

Against all of these difficulties, we need to get back to what we are trying to achieve. The challenge for farmers throughout Australia, at one level, is as it has always been—that is, to deal with an incredibly harsh climate and landscape. We know that climate change is going to make those challenges far more difficult and make that climb much steeper. If we do the work now, then in the years to come the long-term benefits to Australian agriculture will be extraordinary. A heavy burden rests on our shoulders. I think that the nature of the discussion happening in the House today, thanks to the member for New England, is testament to the fact that this parliament and this government are taking that challenge seriously.

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