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 D: Aquaculture
Rapporteur: Professor Rocky de Nys
[first part of report not recorded]
 |
 |
| (Click on images for larger versions) | |
…Many of these species are simply harvested from the wild and then grown up and sold. So we need to really work on fundamental biology. And it’s the fundamental biology that will go hand in hand with the biotechnology here, as Bernie Degnan was saying before, that will drive the whole system for us.
We’ve got a weakness. We don’t really understand the nutrition of a lot of these species, so there’s huge gains that can be made there.
We have diseases that we need to deal with. Some of them are local – they aren’t experienced globally – some of them are experienced throughout the world, but we’re having to deal with them now.
We’ve got a small, very diversified industry with limited research funding. Aquaculture is worth $752 million per year, if I recall the figures correctly. Now it’s targeting towards a one- to two-billion dollar industry in the not too distant future. But three or four species – five altogether, I think – make up 85 per cent of the production. So those are the ones that we have to work with.
We’ve got a fragmented and quite competitive research environment between CSIRO, DPI, the universities and state governments. We’re all going for the same pot of money, and it’s interesting, this comes up over and over again in our conversations, everybody’s trying to do everything and they’re trying to get a piece of the pie.
Fortunately, industry are beginning to set a very strong agenda, so they’re becoming much stronger, they know what they want, and they’re starting to look for the right people to do it. In the past we’ve had a weakness in that R&D providers have tended to set the agenda, and now that’s changing quite significantly.
One of our weaknesses is that we have tended to look within Australia. We haven’t used experience from overseas to try and develop and build what we know.
And I think it would be really good if we defined clear biotechnology objectives for the aquaculture industry, to see where it goes.
(Click on image for a larger version)
We need to link industry husbandry development, that is, the culture of species, with biotechnology advances. Parallel stream everything, rather than let one go up and come behind it. And this comes up as a consistent theme: because we’re developing new species and we’re developing new environments, biotechnology will play a key role in three critical areas – disease, genetics and nutrition.
So what we really need to do now is to target the key industries with the capacity to develop and uptake R&D, and let everything else percolate to the top after that.
Our recommendations are to select key species, to link to a dedicated industry supported biotech program, focusing on disease, genetics and nutrition – and we will come back to how we intend to do that, in our very last slide.
Combine new species with sustainable systems. Because again different species – saltwater, freshwater, on land, in ponds, in cages – all do different things, every biotechnology application will be slightly modified, and husbandry will be strongly modified for those different species.
We need to improve the commercialisation and industry uptake of biotechnology, but I think an important point is that the aquaculture industry will always be small in Australia compared to its global industry. We are less than 0.5 per cent of world value, and we are less than 0.3 per cent of world production. So we are a small industry; aquaculture always will be because of the space constraints in this country and because of the competitive economic forces more globally.
We have a unique opportunity to develop biotechnology within aquaculture, and use that as an industry in its own right for other countries, throughout South East Asia in particular.
(Click on image for a larger version)
We have split our summary up into four: Productivity, Environment, Value Chain and then Social and Ethical.
Under Environment, the strength is that we have a very strongly regulated industry, and it is built on a sustainability platform. That’s got a lot of benefits for us, because as you will see we are very highly valued and very highly thought of; we have a premium product. And that’s the game, this difference between 0.3 per cent volume and 0.5 per cent of the world’s value.
We’re isolated from most diseases. The salmon industry, in particular, when it came in, was set up, was dealt with properly, was quarantined, and essentially we’re biosecure from a lot of different aspects of the industry.
We have seen all the bad things that have happened overseas, and we can build on those. We have a very good environmental reputation in Australia; it is very sound. And biotechnology is accepted as a key tool in developing sustainability and industry development now, because we have gone through an initial build-up phase. We have a huge in-sea and, really importantly, on-land (read: saline water) aquaculture resource. We have got a very strong environmental science capability, and that’s where most of the biotechnology application is actually placed at the moment.
(Click on image for a larger version)
But there are weaknesses. It is very hard to get sites, because there are lots of sensitive locations. And rightly so. We are competing with agriculture and urban development – agriculture, ponds et cetera, urban development, Port Stephens. People who have paid $800,000 for their very nice house don’t want to see a fish cage just off the shore. And so you’ve got a lot of conflicting interests.
There is a very tight legislative environment, so there are a lot of regulations that have to be met, which adds costs. And, because we have got this wonderful, unique species resource that we have in Australia, we actually had that as an advantage but it is a weakness as well, in that we have to develop this from scratch. So we are doing a ground-up start.
(Click on image for a larger version)
What are our priorities? Well, again it is linking biotechnology with industry development.
We need to develop our under-utilised resource base with technology developments, so the species that we have link in with genetic selection for traits that are suitable for in-land saline aquaculture, disease resistance, and nutrition that meets those environments and those requirements as well.
As to biotech recommendations: we should develop a platform to implement biotechnology into the environmental platform, while recognising that it is probably the thing that we can pitch and sell to the highest degrees overseas.
(Click on image for a larger version)
The value chain is an unusual one, but we actually found quite a strong input from the talk this morning on beef cattle, because essentially when you look at those need applications that the livestock industry have, we don’t have those – and they are not being used in the industry.
So, we have got a strength: we have got great products, we have got a lot of unique Australian species, we have got high value species, like tuna. So you can fly tuna to Japan and you can look at $20,000 if you have got the right flesh quality, as opposed to $2000 or $3000. So you can make a tenfold change in value by looking at these product quality issues. And there is a lot to be addressed here, using biotechnology.
We get a premium price because we have a ‘clean green’ image, so that’s a strong point. And we have out of season production, or off-season production.
Again, we have a good biotechnology base, from industries like livestock, that we should be looking to implement into this region, to value add to the products that we are doing and ensure that we are getting the best dollar that we can for our product.
(Click on image for a larger version)
Weakness: we simply haven’t developed the criteria for product value in many cases. And, if we do, how are we going to develop the technology to do that? So there is a whole area of development here that we can build on to really try and make something quite positive.
(Click on image for a larger version)
We identified our priority as developing product quality measures, using livestock experience, and maintaining farmed quality compared to wild caught, because the industry has to match the perception of the consumer with regard to wild caught fish. Lots of people will go, ‘I won’t eat farmed barramundi. Wild caught tastes much better,’ but there are very few quantitative parameters to demonstrate this. And we can maintain that quality using some nice technology.
So to the recommendations here: select key parameters, link it to industry supported biotech programs, particularly in the case of high value species – and again high value links in to the larger industries as well.
(Click on image for a larger version)
Finally, social and ethical: our strength here is that we have a highly accepted ‘clean green’ image. The industry is actually very highly regarded, in Australia and globally. We have an educated and well-informed industry. The industry now has very strong R&D committees – they have steering committees for projects, they direct research, and they have clear priorities, which is great.
There is an accepted need for production to balance wild-capture. So everybody accepts aquaculture has to be there: the world’s population is growing, and if we don’t have aquaculture there is a protein deficit – end of story.
There is a need for aquaculture to balance recreational fishing. That’s just a dinky-di Aussie thing: everybody likes to go out and fish, and the recreational catch is close to matching the commercial catch. So aquaculture also plays a significant role there.
So aquaculture is well accepted, and it is supported by a strong regulatory framework. It has got a good product, and it has got very strong support, particularly in regional and rural Australia, where it is a very high employer.
(Click on image for a larger version)
Weakness? The major weakness, social and ethical, was the term ‘biotechnology’. If you say ‘biotechnology’, people start to become very nervous. And even the scientists in the group today, and the industry representatives, got edgy. If you say ‘genetically modified’, it’s all over. So there is a real need to sell the term ‘biotechnology’ – or technology as applied to biology – very specifically without going down the GM route. It’s just something that’s not going to happen in the near future. We didn’t think that we could see that happening in the next 10 or 15 years, because industry and consumers simply won’t go there.
We need to link much more clearly, to industry and to consumers, the benefits of biotechnology. And we need to make sure that we don’t go running for money and setting up inappropriate biotechnologies for industry that we think would be great for our own research funding.
(Click on image for a larger version)
Priorities, social and ethical: maintain a low impact and acceptability; reinforce the benefits in applications of biotechnology to the industry; ensure the division between GM and broad biotechnology applications; and – the final recommendation – improve the application of biotechnology to demonstrate the benefits. We think we are getting there very strongly with industry supporting it, but we need to develop a forum more closely, between the broader biotech providers, the industry itself, and the Aquafin CRC, which is about to go through some rebirth process, is a good platform to try and get this initiated.
Discussion
Question – Given that the development of any GM trait takes 15 years, if you fast forward and try and look at the world in 15 years, don’t you think you might need a little bit of vision now, in thinking how GM applications should be applied to aquaculture, so you can bring them actually into line with the rest of agriculture?
Rocky de Nys – I think that is a fair call. And I think the safest way – this is a personal view, no longer representing the broader panel – is that people have done this with salmon already. So we have a showcase species. Salmon is sitting there, we know what the consumer acceptance is towards it, we know how it has been developed. Okay, we’re not taking a lead, but we can do the uptake. And that is one of the advantages of being a little bit behind everybody else.
Chair – I was surprised to hear you say that we have space difficulties. The coastline to the right of Port Lincoln is a few hundred kilometres, right?
Rocky de Nys – Yes, but there are very few sheltered areas. Intensive cage aquaculture, normally, they can sit up to a wave height of 2 or 3 metres, so if something comes in beyond that, it is simply no longer suitable for that sort of…
Chair – And what about the in-land, on-land aquaculture?
Rocky de Nys – That has fantastic potential – the whole saline aquaculture, pulling up water, using it. You have got to deal with some deficiencies in nutrients, but scientifically you can overcome all of those quite easily. And I think that is where we will see the growth in Australia, because it is environmentally acceptable, it meets regional and rural targets, we have unique species that live in those environments – most fish like silver perch and golden perch can live in those environments quite happily – and all we need to do now is link up all the biotechnology ducks in a row, and develop those in parallel so that we can actually optimise out outputs.
Question – Did your panel look at any non-fish aquaculture – seaweeds and so on?
Rocky de Nys – Very much fish and crustaceans. We recognise that the plant thing is the largest-volume crop in the world. There is nothing in Australia yet, at this point. There is no commercial seaweed aquaculture in this country.
Question (continued) – Isn’t that an opportunity?
Rocky de Nys – That is an opportunity, yes. I would accept that.
