HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK
Biotechnology and the future of Australian agriculture
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26 July 2005
Mixed breakout groups
Groups identify the common threads in agriculture biotechnology issues for Australia
Group A
Rapporteur: Dr Sharon Hamill
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The activities that make up biotechnology are not all GMO, and they need to be communicated at all levels – within the organisation, right down, through growers, funding bodies, educators, down to the consumer. But we need to develop people with improved communication skills that use this non-inflammatory language to communicate the benefits and background issues that people want so they can make some more informed decisions.
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We needed in this forum, even, to have more innovative discussion, but we couldn’t undertake that because of time constraints. And in Australia we really need to aim for more far-reaching changes – really innovative new approaches, particularly in the areas that contribute to environmental sustainability – and we need to anticipate future important population needs and international trends. So really we have got to keep considering this competitive advantage.
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Environmentally beneficial research is needed, but also it must offer economic benefits that can be seen not only by the governments but by the growers, feeding down through to consumers.
We could better integrate our research across our commodities. There is one example where discarded products from one industry could be used by another industry – or do we really consider what is needed in plant crops that might be used for animal industries, that sort of thing.
The integration of research organisations to work together is really something we should aim for so we get better results sooner, instead of competing with each other.
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We shouldn’t over emphasise GMs in our current systems, but we might need to work in future to design better systems that might be more compatible with GMs. In other words, GMs should not be used as a bandaid now, because it is the production systems that need to change. Other biotechnology and conventional solutions, coupled with change to production, should not be overlooked to overcome some of these constraints.
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Our end products need to be considered to be value added. That includes things like better nutrition and maybe better differentiated products. The farmers need to have a profitable business, and this is what is also driving our current research. So we need to better emphasise the benefits of the research.
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Innovative discussions on the issues facing biotechnology and the future of agriculture need to be continued by the researchers. We also considered that, while we need to show proof of concept, we also need to show proof of market to be able to obtain support for this research. But it is hard to actually show these sorts of things when our future targets might be 30 years ahead.
The future biotechnology products produced in Australia, we must consider, may not always be consumed here anyway, but might be 100 per cent marketed overseas, where there might not be any consumer resistance at all.
Group B
Rapporteur: Dr Barry Pogson
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A potential problem with community engagement and picking the so-called killer application, of course, was that it is not just whether it is the killer application from the consumer’s point of view; the industry has to want it too. And we need to be better able to measure the potential benefits of technologies and also to be able to engage the industries, to help them understand whether or not it is worth while developing those technologies. So assessment of the marketplace, from the scientist right through to the community, is something that we feel is an important issue in biotechnology – again coming back to emphasising the benefit to the consumer.
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Training: there was a need for bioinformaticists. This is a point that really interfaces with the biologists, that often a disconnect is felt with the bioinformaticists. I think maybe we are not always identifying what we need in our training programs at a university level, and I think universities should be thinking harder about what bioinformatics is really needed by biological sciences.
Phenomics: this is in some ways synonymous to physiologists. We need classical training in physiology and biochemistry to be able to take the new technologies, test the function of genes, and really determine which traits are complex traits that are solvable and how simply solvable they can be.
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We need to position Australia in the international market at all times, thinking about what are our potential opportunities, doing the standard SWOT analysis.
We need to place more emphasis on hitting high-value and high-end applications in crops.
A strong thing that in this country is again a universal theme and that has broad acceptance in this country is the need for sustainable agriculture, sustainable ecosystems. I think these are things that are broadly accepted by the wider community, and therefore they are areas of research – (a) there is a need; (b) there is consumer acceptance. And thinking about sustainable agriculture and fragile ecosystems should be an area that biotech industries are investing in.
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Pastures were something we raised as an issue, because we felt pasture crops weren’t something that was adequately considered by a couple of the breakout groups. What is the potential to develop them further? What considerations need to be taken to expand their markets? One potential issue commented on was that they are heavy users of water – can their water use efficiency be raised? And, again, water use efficiency across all Australian industries is a big issue in this country.
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Finally, technological limitations. What happens at the moment, as you are all aware, is that in this country we have a series of research and development councils that focus on their particular industry or their particular crop. They have a levy-based system. It has been a fundamental system that has funded a lot of great research in this country, and funded a lot of very applied and strategic research.
Such a system, though, has its limitations. We have new crops in the horticultural industries, as we have discussed; we have minor varieties; and then we have the underpinning systems biologies and genome sciences when we are dealing with genes that are common to all crop species. We have a need for basic research and networks and modelling. We can’t do this in every single crop and species that Australia farms.
One thing that I would like to suppose, and that our group broadly supported, is an Agricultural Research Fund – something along the lines of a levy off the top of all the research development corporations (RDCs) that made a central fund, administered by the RDCs, to fund strategic research that wasn’t necessarily existing-crop specific but benefited all agricultural industries.
Group C: Livestock
Rapporteur: Dr Chris Ormandy
1. Environmental sustainability seemed to come out across all the presentations we heard this morning. If all of agriculture, not just biotechnology or GM or whatever, isn’t sustainable and damage neutral, then it won’t proceed in the future. And if it is sustainable and is not damaging, then it will certainly help with the public’s perception of the new technologies and help uptake. So what we develop has to be environmentally sustainable.
2. It seemed that we needed rapid application of the genetic diversity that exists in our various systems, to be achieved by a number of techniques: decrease in generation time, for example, something we have spoken about in the Dairy CRC through IVF, by increasing the detection of natural mutants, as I spoke about earlier on – a lot can be done there, and if God gives us the mutant why not use it? – and then better methods for simultaneously selecting for diverse traits which allow us to get hold of the phenotypes that we want without losing other things that are important. And we need better techniques for doing that.
3. We spent most of our time on GM education. This is an issue that is far, far more complex than I ever realised before today, and I imagine it is probably far, far more complex than anyone in here realises. I will deal with the points on this just as they fell out, in no particular order.
First, we thought that scientists shouldn’t communicate a pro-gene message directly with consumers, because it’s just too much of a difficult problem to allow scientists to go out there and say whatever they like, as we do. We think it should be left to industry experts rather than scientists – people that know how to communicate properly.
Second, we feel that there is insufficient public education of the benefits of what we are doing, and that doesn’t allow the consumer to evaluate whether the benefit is worth the risk. At the moment the consumer is saying, ‘It’s all too risky, I don’t want to do it,’ because the benefits aren’t being explained and perhaps the risks aren’t being properly explained either. So we need better communication of both the benefits and the risks, so that the consumer can see that the benefits outweigh the risks and therefore go for the technology.
Third – and this is an interesting point – the language is very emotive in this area. I had no idea just how emotive it is. So this is one reason why scientists perhaps shouldn’t do it, and why professionals should. The language needs to be very carefully worded, so that the right message is put into the ears of the people that want to hear it. And again that’s why we need professionals to do this.
Fourth, the consumer is not ignorant. In fact, the consumer is very savvy. The consumer has been able to work out, up to now, that the risks in fact do outweigh the benefits, and they’re not having a bar of it. So the consumer is really good. The stock market worked out who was to blame for the space shuttle crash within 20 minutes, and none of them were scientists or engineers. So my group thinks the consumer is exactly the same sort of person, that they can very quickly work out if there is a risk for them that is not outweighed by benefits.
The last point that came out of this – again very interesting, I think – is the ‘branding’ of the message. If you think of the message, if you have a branding by Greenpeace you know exactly what it’s going to be like; or perhaps you have a branding by Monsanto and you’ve got some idea of what the message is like. But if the CSIRO supports something, then that’s seen as a brand that guarantees safety and public benefit. And so the message, if it is branded correctly, can be very potent, and CSIRO seems to be in an enviable position at this point that it is untainted by public greed, seen as acting for the public good, and also untainted by the eco-terrorists of Greenpeace.
4. Innovation, the panel thought, was driven by innovative farmers as much as it is driven by innovative scientists, so we must enable an information flow to the end users of our technology, so that they can adopt it and drive it forward. And also we have got to listen to them, to see what they want, because they can really help us out to produce good products. So, a two-way information flow between what we dream up on the bus going to work and what the farmers actually have in their fields.
5. Don’t stop working on GM just because the current consumer opinion is against it. Who knows what is going to happen in 25 years? After all, the pasteurisation example is very poignant, I think. So don’t stop thinking about it, don’t put it out of your mind, it may come around and it may be a huge benefit to us all.
6. We need coordination of research across industries and disciplines to hasten the adoption of new technology. A couple of people made the point that medical advances hadn’t been taken up quickly by the agricultural community, and so if we can have some way of bringing scientists together across industries and across disciplines, perhaps we can get round that barrier.
Group D
Rapporteur: Professor Rocky de Nys
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You need a good idea and you need to have consumer acceptance. There is a strong resistance to the GM side of biotechnology. There is a need for risk management. And the science push needs to be matched to the consumer and industry pull.
I think the interesting thing is long-term market predictions – it started to come across at the end of everybody’s presentation: strategic research that has got a high risk; a strategic prediction scenario for long-term demand for different crops, how those will change and how we can then match a strategic research to fit into that.
And there is potentially a need for long-term controlled GM-based research. This links into a fund that could possibly do this, because the mechanisms for this aren’t really clear.
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Develop consistent consumer-accepted terminologies. So, develop new terms or accept terms or modify perceptions. And ensure broad acceptance of defined terminologies, by government, NGOs, industries and consumer markets, so that we do have a way to identify exactly what the consumer is getting and people will be receiving. This comes to education. There is a very strong need to educate broadly – and I concur with the need for the right sales and the right people to sell this whole thing. And there is an emphasis for enhanced production and the benefits.
The other thing that came across was that there is a fear of globalisation. Biotech equals globalisation for many people, and so you need to divorce biotechnology from the globalisation arena and actually allow people to differentiate exactly what it is and be educated in that regard.
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Strong regulation could help this a lot. If you have got a robust regulatory environment – for example, CSIRO or through government – and you have true-to-label retailing so that everybody knows exactly where they stand, and there is a common clear goal for everybody who is involved, you have made significant progress.
The other thing that was interesting, but was brought up at the end of the discussion and could have gone on for a long time, was that there is a division between what is perceived as ‘good’ biotech research – that is, the biomedical community and anything to do with human health – and ‘bad’ biotech research – food production. Clearly, what is driving that is what is forcing a big problem in the whole agricultural platform.
Group E
Rapporteur: Dr Chris Blanchard
It was good to see some groups worked some of the points out, but we’ve got it all worked out! It really came down to three areas that were the common threads. The main one was funding, which is not surprising; another was IP; and there were some other issues as well.
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Some people have touched on funding already. Really, our current funding models constrain the sort of research that we want to do. If we are looking to do research into a new crop species which may not be a grain, then it is going to be a little bit hard for, maybe, GRDC to fund that sort of thing. So where do we go for funding for those sorts of things?
Certainly there is limited infrastructure, compared to our overseas competitors, and limited support from our governments. So that is something that needs to change, obviously. Maybe one approach is to consolidate infrastructure. Instead of having, say, 100 different sequencing facilities, maybe we can consolidate and work together a little bit more.
So maybe we need to think more globally, rather than just in the community that we are existing in in Australia, but we have to ask the question of how that is going to affect funding from our local funding bodies. One solution might be global partnering, and someone came up with the interesting point that people with money have no ideas, people with ideas have no money. So it may be important for us to go to those large, global companies to seek money from them in exchange for some of our brilliant ideas.
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On IP issues, certainly it seems that a lot of people are talking about the complication that IP has introduced into our research. So we have situations now where we have a number of funding organisations owning part of an IP. It really constrains our research, and doesn’t give us a lot of freedom to operate. Someone suggested maybe an open-source model for IP.
Another interesting suggestion was to ask, again: why can’t we do this as a team effort? Instead of a number of people in Australia having individual licences to do certain things, can we approach it from an Australia-wide view and maybe have an Australia-wide licence for using a particular promoter or whatever it might be?
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Some other issues: people have talked already about terminology. It is important that we are clear and consistent in our terminology.
Certainly the environment is an important factor, and we see that there are a lot of opportunities there, and certainly opportunities for partnering with, maybe, large companies or alternative funding sources, such as mining industries, to put money back into, say, plants that will clean up the environment, or whatever.
More planning was a common theme. We really need to think about the whole value-added chain before we launch into a particular project.
Push-marketing we thought was not a bad idea, coming up with products that maybe people hadn’t thought of. It might be a new type of fruit, so we say, ‘Have a look at this. This has got all these health qualities.’ And we should be pushing more the positive messages, such as producing peanut butter that doesn’t have any allergens in it.
Also, we think it is very important for us to have a marketing presence in the global market. So if something is not attractive in Japan, maybe we have a market in South America.
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I guess our take home message is that what we really need is some kind of a unified national solution. And we really need it now. We really see that Australia is a pretty small place – why can’t we work together on a more unified national sort of a solution?
