Food Security and Australian Agriculture. (December 4, 2010)

Wednesday, December 1, saw the publication by the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC) of  Australia and Food Security in a Changing World which listed the following four recommendations:

• Provide the basis for a national approach to addressing food security challenges: The Expert Working Group recommends the establishment of the Australian Food Security Agency. The Australian Food.

• Australia [should] increase investment in agricultural R&D to harness national expertise and take a leading role in national and international programs targeted to improving low input farming systems.

•  The development of incentives to recruit and nurture future generations of innovative and adaptive farmers, researchers and associated professionals for the Australian food production and processing sectors.

• Better engaging of the community and partner organisations to elevate the status of food in Australia and build cooperative commitment to an improved food value chain.

The next day the Brisbane Times' Courtney Trenwith reported:

The University of Queensland has cut some teaching and research programs as part of a new tertiary education era that Vice-Chancellor [and newly appointed Chair of the Group of Eight] Paul Greenfield said would affect the entire sector.

UQ has already cut back some programs in primary industries and agriculture and has focused humanities on arts and languages. Its engineering faculty was also under review.

[Professor Greenfield said]"We've done some things to ensure that we keep agricultural research but it's more narrow than it once was. I think parts of engineering will [go]. There's no threat to engineering but there won't be as many types of engineering as we currently offer. The process is just starting and the results from ERA will be one factor that will influence that because it will say whether we've got strength in the university in that area."

Interestingly, University of New England's former Chair of Mixed Farming Systems in the School of Environmental and Rural Sciences, Jim Scott, in addressing the 15^th Australian Society of Agronomy Conference, a fortnight ago emphasised the following points:

Nurturing inter-generational knowledge. As a secure food supply indefinitely into the future is not assured, human societies across the world must respond by... developing and protecting robust knowledge systems that will transfer knowledge reliably between generations. The young discipline of Agricultural Science needs to respond in new ways to regain the trust it deserves. It can do this by focusing on the provision of objective information accompanied by explicit declarations of any vested interests... We need an ever-evolving, robust scaffold of knowledge that can be trusted, not only by scientists, but also by farmers, consumers, journalists and policy makers.

Long-term focus. ...A critical mass of well-trained researchers, recruited from the most talented of our students, need to enjoy rewarding and productive careers without the burden and inefficiency of stop-start, short-term project funding. Projects judged to be worthy need ‘over-the-horizon’ funding so that long-term outcomes can be realised.

Efficient life cycle of production/consumption. ...Currently, “constraints are emerging in terms of land and water resources as well as imperatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”. Issues such as soil erosion and soil loss through urbanisation and mining, together with water and nutrient cycles need to be tackled urgently. Ideally, food needs to be produced near where it is consumed....

Farmer involvement. Importantly, farmers need to become more engaged in long-term issues, including research directions, as top-down approaches have not been effective in maintaining the skill base to support our food supply system. They also need to help develop, in conjunction with consumers, a new system of rewards so that those who feed us can afford to do so whilst sustaining the natural resources that support food production. Profitable farming will also result in thriving regional communities.

Homo sapiens as part of global ecology. If we are to enjoy sufficient safe and healthy food over the long-term, for at least the next 10,000 years, we will need to better understand the ecological interactions that support this hungry organism, man, and his co-inhabitants of this finite planet and implement policies in the light of this understanding. ...[T]he scale and speed of change currently required of human food production systems, is unprecedented.

At the moment there would seem to be something of a disconnect between PMSEIC and Professor Scott on the one hand and the Chair Group of Eight , Professor Greenfield on the other.