HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK
Biotechnology and the future of Australian agriculture
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26 July 2005
Session 3: Reporting back and discussion
Group C: Livestock
Rapporteur: Dr Chris Ormandy
We had a very free-ranging conversation about the aspects of livestock. The group comprised people from the laboratory all the way through to people who market the stuff.
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We started with 'Productivity – more, bigger, better'. This immediately kicked off a discussion about GMOs, the anti-GM sentiment that is out there amongst consumers, and this occupied quite a lot of time in the initial part of the conversation.
The big point that came out of this is that productivity, environment, the social aspects et cetera are all linked and just can’t be broken apart. The consumer sentiment about things such as environment, concerns about animal welfare and biodiversity – production has to incorporate these aspects of consumer sentiment. If it divorces itself from that, we felt, new products will just sit on the shelves, if they even get that far. These things are intrinsically linked.
Another aspect that came out of our deliberations over productivity was that biotechnology is not all genetic modification. In fact, there is a lot of non-GM biotechnology out there. We need to really counter the growing loss of distinction between these two – which is probably a disinformation campaign being deliberately put out. As I will show you later on, ‘GM’ is just two letters that covers a huge amount of science, and it is really unfair that that should be the case.
I have here two examples of non-GM biotechnology that have come out of our discussions. One is the detection of natural mutants. A huge breeding program is actually going on out there, and I know from what has happened at the Jackson Laboratories with mice that if you can train people to spot natural mutants you can find incredible diversity – if you manage to spot them and pick them up.
Another non-GM biotechnology, of course, is what we have always done: breeding. But with the genomes of these organisms and the discovery of snps, this is now a completely new technology, in essence, and it should be developed.
Probably the major barrier to this at the moment is a good assay for the phenotype that you want to get at. It is a real problem out there. If you are looking for a two-headed something, that’s easy. But if you are looking for, in livestock, something to do with meat to fat ratio, or feed utilisation et cetera, it is very hard to measure some of these phenotypes. And so good assays are what is required if we are actually going to either detect new mutants or carry out these excellent breeding programs.
The other thing about these things is that you have to find a way to put a dollar value into it. If you can’t put a dollar value into consumer sentiment, or if you can’t put a dollar value, perhaps, into those phenotypes, it is very difficult to screen for them or to produce a product that the consumer likes.
Another problem facing us is that gene-environment interactions in the livestock industry – and, I’m sure, other industries – are not well understood. An illustrative fact here is that 20 per cent, I think it was, of elite US bulls that come to Australia fail when they get here. They are absolutely useless. They would never make it in Australia. However, they are elite bulls in America. So we have to understand the entire production system: not just the animals but all other aspects – their feed, the climate, the pathogens they are exposed to, the way they are handled, a number of other things. And perhaps you could even consider the consumer in this equation as well, as another set of genes in the supply chain.
Also, of course, livestock faces competition from cheaper producers and also alternative protein sources such as crops. Who is to say that livestock will be the major source of protein, going forward? It may not be possible to produce enough.
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The overall theme was that this industry must be environmentally sustainable. It absolutely has to be. And an approach to this is similar to an approach that manufacturers are taking with whitegoods, motor cars et cetera, that the life cycle of the product needs to be understood, it needs to be described properly, and we need to return as much as possible of the by-products in the production process back into the production cycle – reduce our waste streams. Who knows, maybe it goes as far as pulling bones out of garbage and returning them as fertiliser. But it needs to be sustainable, and one approach to this is to understand fully the life cycle of the product.
A second aspect is the footprint of livestock in Australia. We need to better understand what is the footprint. Can we carry more cattle? Are we putting cattle in the right place? And, if we have reached the limit on our carrying capacity, how do we now lift value per animal? Since we can’t have more animals, how do we lift value per animal, and therefore increase the value of production, not necessarily the bulk of production?
And environmental use, as I said before, must carry some value. Currently, industry is free to pollute and degrade as it wishes, and obviously this is not sustainable.
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The consumer must benefit from biotechnology, whether it be GM or otherwise, in order to want to have the product. So, if production is going to be bigger and better, it must be linked to consumer benefits. We saw one way to do this as, especially, health demands. If we are talking about functional foods and nutraceuticals et cetera, if people can see that this new biology is producing healthier foods, then they’ll want them. If they just see that it’s cutting production costs for the producer, they don’t want them.
Another aspect is that this is becoming pluralistic market. So ‘the consumer’ goes from a food faddist who won’t eat anything that’s not grown organically under moonlight, or whatever, all the way through to people who just buy tonnes of milk powder on the commodities markets. And so the industry has to adapt to that.
Another issue is labelling. As I was saying, ‘GM’ is just two little letters splashed in a great big thing saying ‘GM’ to describe all sorts of things like gene deletion, amplification, transfer and who knows what other genetic modifications will come in the future. To label it as GM is absurd; it absolutely is absurd.
The other aspect of labelling is that the consumer is demanding more and more to know exactly where that product comes from. Who’s the farmer that produced this piece of meat? How has it been treated? Where was it killed? et cetera, et cetera. Now, that is very information intensive, and is going to require information systems that stretch all the way from the farm to the shopping centre. And so we have to deal with that.
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Finally, we didn’t have too much to say about the social aspects. Just a couple of comments came up.
The first is about adoption. We were thinking about the Golden Rice product that we heard about. Will the Third World actually want that, and can you extend that to the rest of society? Will they actually want to have these products that we’re producing? And who knows, the social forces that we’re dealing with may be as complex as the production genetics that we have to deal with as well. As I said before, the consumers are another set of genes, right at the end of the supply chain.
Discussion
Question – Did you discuss at all the possibilities of manipulation of GM at the ruminant level, at the microbial level, rather than actually trying to manipulate these very large mammals?
Chris Ormandy – There was a suggestion that we look at transient manipulations, perhaps, at the ruminant level, so that we don’t actually end up with a genetically modified animal but we do get the benefits of a manipulation. Yes, we talked about that – as a possibility.
