NATIONAL PRESS CLUB ADDRESS

Tomorrow's agriculture – we need to work things out!

27 July 2005
Dr Jim Peacock FAA
President, Australian Academy of Science

Today's agriculture is not yesterday's agriculture and tomorrow's agriculture cannot be today's agriculture. Winston Churchill said 'the farther backward you can look the farther forward you are likely to see' – he was emphasising change and improvement.

Today, farmers know they have to look after the natural resources; maintain the fertility of the soil; be careful with water use; use chemicals wisely; and use the biological advantages of rotation farming.

The difference between yesterday's and today's agriculture has depended upon better management, better varieties and better understanding and response mechanisms to market requirements. In turn, these improvements have depended on research and the translation of new knowledge into farming practice.

We can expect research to continue to produce further new knowledge providing the basis for continuing improvement in management techniques, in new and better varieties with products able to meet the increasingly differentiated specifications of global markets.

There has never been a time when improvement in agricultural performance has been needed so much. The world's population is increasing, we need to produce more food, but we need to produce it with greater reliability, greater empathy with the environment and with products having increased nutritional quality. Every person on Earth should have the right to enough food, but it should be good food – as good as we can make it!

The demands are great but we do have remarkable opportunities to respond. So do our competitors, who trade in the same global markets and even in our own Australian market.

Biological research has been transformed by technologies which are allowing us to understand the workings of genes, providing a new level of understanding of how plants function in their environments and of the molecular and cellular bases of their development. These are areas critical to crop performance and food production.

Understanding genes and their role in crop performance has been important for our cotton industry. The industry has been a profligate user of chemical insecticides to protect the crop from pest insects which had the capability of reducing yields to zero. A problem arose with the pests becoming resistant to the pesticides which our society approved for use and which were affordable to the farmer. The new technology of modifying the biological software of the crop so that it could protect itself against its worst pest has reintroduced competitiveness and the prospect of a continuing and improving industry.

Two gene constructs have been added to the 30,000 genes already in the cotton genome, its genetic software. These two gene constructs have enabled the plant to produce specific molecules in their leaves and bolls which kill the major pest, moth larvae. Another gene construct has provided protection against the best possible weedicide for the crop and has revolutionised weed control in the cotton farming system.

The transgenic cottons were introduced with important management constraints on the farmers. These management practices look to preserve the value of the impacts of the new technologies. Yield, quality and profits have gone up, chemical usage has gone down – drastically. The environment has benefited enormously and the farmers and farm workers have a better quality of life.

This is not the end of needed improvements. There are severe challenges from pathogens and although our breeders have given us wonderful fibre quality for the markets, we need to look for further differentiation from the products of other cotton producing countries.

In a non-drought year, the new technologies support a $1.7 billion industry, a 98 per cent export industry, a planting seed industry within Australia worth $175 million. Already our varieties are 30 per cent of the planting seed in the United States and becoming a significant component of the cotton industry in southern Europe and South America.

The building of a national and international industry is important but we must stay in front – to mark time is to open a grave for the industry.

The same imperative of improvement applies to our other crop industries. In regard to transgenic technology, canola is the next crop being considered in Australia. As you know there are state-based moratoria against its introduction. At present the advantages being offered through transgenic varieties relate to herbicide resistance and the introduction of high yielding hybrids. Australian canola growers suffer a considerable yield penalty relative to the Canadian farms where the transgenic hybrids have been so successful. There are a number of other possible input and output traits that will need the new technologies.

My suggestion is that the canola industry itself must become intimately involved. It is not a question for individual farmers to decide or even small groups of farmers. It needs to be an industry decision. I would recommend canola growers and marketers to take a look at the way in which transgenic cotton was introduced into Australia.

The industry, through the Australian Cotton Growers Research Association , played a major role in interacting with the researchers and government regulatory bodies. The transgenic crop was introduced gradually with strict controls of management. Ongoing decisions were made with recommendations to the regulatory bodies from industry committees who looked at the performance of the transgenics in relation to the conventional varieties. These were crucial success factors in adoption of the transgenic crop. Before any transgenic crop was grown, there was a cleared market pathway.

The canola industry should be able to adopt the same process. As I understand, we have three major markets for our canola and at least two of these countries have cleared the way for transgenic canola to be used within their borders. It should be possible for the industry to confirm market opportunities and remove that particular criticism from the equation of consideration. The other oft cited difficulties of dangers of super-weed production have been dispelled by careful research studies. The industry should easily be able to organise itself with necessary segregation procedures.

The canola industry as a whole needs to be behind the decisions to define a sensible, practical way of introducing the new‑technology crop, integrated with the alternative farming systems.

Looking now at our cereal crops, wheat and barley. The breeders have enormous challenges ahead of them. In many cases the germplasm is not available to meet the challenges of disease and environmental stresses. It is highly likely that the new technologies will be able to significantly increase the capabilities of the breeders. That doesn't mean that we have to move to a transgenic crop in the near future. What it does mean is that we can make full use of the power of the new research methods to define ways forward, either in better input traits or in developing new quality features for these grains.

It is possible in these cereals to use conventional breeding technologies to achieve new objectives that have been defined by genetic technology research. Nevertheless, it is highly probable that there are some improvements either for increased yield, meeting stress environments or the addition of new grain qualities that will need transgenic technologies.

With so many customer countries, the wheat industry faces a major challenge to open up assured market opportunities for the crop. Once again, the industry has to play a central role in deciding in what way transgenic varieties can be introduced to be grown alongside conventional varieties and with different farming systems, like organic farming. I am certain that we will need to find a way to do this because our competitors are not standing still.

I want to mention one area of challenge to our cereal industries where I believe that transgenic technology will be critical. In the near future, agriculture, more than ever before, will be linked directly to matters of public health. The diseases of our western societies are largely a consequence of lifestyle changes, including diet. Many diet-related diseases, like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, colonic cancer, result in large part from the way we live.

We can change our foods so that our most common staple foods will help guard against the onset of these diseases and will make a significant contribution to reducing the enormous expenditure of therapeutic medicine.

Diabetes is the epidemic of the 21^st century. This is true in developing countries as well as in western countries like Australia.

People in different countries consume the staple cereals, wheat, rice or maize. If the important starch component of these cereals had a low glycemic index, we would be a long way to reducing the incidence and severity of diabetes. It is possible to modify cereal grains so that they will be of greater nutritional value and more closely meet our requirements. Remember, our cereals are not very far removed from the wild plants from which they were derived during the last 10,000 years. It is highly probable that we will be able to modify their biochemical constitutions to our advantage.

An example in barley is where a single genetic letter change in one gene, a gene in the starch biosynthetic pathway, changes the starch composition of the grain to a situation where clinical trials have already demonstrated its value as a low glycemic index food. This variety can be introduced to the market right now, not as a transgenic barley, but as a barley changed by mutagenesis and conventional breeding. We are likely to see it soon in breads and breakfast cereals.

The grain is a sophisticated delivery package of a variety of ingredients essential to our health. As well as starch, proteins, fatty acids and antioxidants can all be adjusted to better fit human nutrition requirements.

We can now teach plants to make long chain omega 3 fatty acids, oils that we currently mostly get now through the consumption of fish. Fish do not make these oils, they are made by microscopic algae in the ocean, and the fish just store the oils from their food supply. Researchers have been able to take the genes from the microscopic ocean plants and put them into our crop plants so that they too can make long chain omega 3 oils, so important for cardiovascular and other body systems.

Our food will increasingly be an important component of our preventative health system.

Is safety of genetically modified crops or food a real consideration? This is something that our regulatory systems have addressed very effectively. There is no reason to suspect that any food made with, or using components from, genetically modified crops will be any less safe than any other food we consume at present.

There are 80 million hectares of GM crops around the world at present and the area is increasing rapidly – 5 per cent of agricultural production in the world is a convincing safety recommendation, particularly since there has been no substantiated negative effects on human or environmental health. 30 million farmers are growing genetically modified crops, we should see this as a wake-up call.

Even within Australia our agribusiness is faced with the challenge of imports, which are frequently cheaper, finding their way into our supermarkets. We need consumer preference for Australian agricultural products and this must be based on recognition of quality and the efficiency of production leading to competitive pricing. Consumer acceptance and preference will be hard to achieve, because most people are urban dwellers and do not know where their food comes from.

A product grown with 86 per cent less chemical insecticides means little to the consumer. It is not until we have direct health benefits at fair prices, that we can expect real acceptance and preference for our agricultural products – transgenic or conventional.

The same applies to our export markets. If we want to be assured of markets for our products, we have to make sure that the whole business chain for any crop and its products has an integrated drive for export performance. Market pathways need to be opened with consumer countries accepting our products, including transgenic products, and they need to be persuaded, as we have done in the past, that Australian products are superior quality products.

Where we have a market opportunity we need to make sure we do not make any mistakes. In the case of cotton, as big a success as the transgenics have been, the success was determined not only by the new genetics, but by the farmers who adopted the appropriate management protocols. In this case, as in every case of transgenic cropping, it is the genetics and the management together that will make a lasting success. This technology is so powerful and valuable that it would be a tragedy if we lost it through inappropriate practices.

In this brief picture of the prospects of biotechnology contributions to future agribusiness, I have painted a mosaic image, but I have emphasised that already there have been some major successes and that we can expect more of these successes.

Biotechnology is like any other business system - in the earlier stages of any project the opportunity and the objectives need to be defined carefully. There needs to be the development of a realistic business plan, extending from basic research through the placement of protective intellectual property claims, through the cost of adherence to regulatory requirements and very probably to the formation of the partnerships that will be needed along the business chain.

Finally, I want to emphasise the need for effective communication – at all levels of the community, and of business and extending to decision makers. It is important for our Parliamentary representatives to fully understand what is being proposed so they can assess the benefits, perceived risk balance on factual evidence. In Australia we have put a number of regulatory bodies in place to examine the safety, performance and environmental impacts of GM crops and of all food products. Their recommendations deserve to be recognised. It is sometimes easier for a politician to say no to any proposition, say to a new technology, than to have the courage to say yes, even though to say no may ultimately have untoward and serious negative consequences to business, to the environment and to human health.