AUSTRALIA: National forum to discuss food 'crisis'
Updated
Last year global food prices rose by 40 per cent, leading the Food and Agriculture Organisation to warn that 37 countries are now at risk of a food crisis. The slump in Australian wheat production is partly the cause; this week the EU blamed the drought here for helping drive up European food costs. But experts warn three other factors have combined to ensure high prices are here to stay. They say the world's population adds another 100 million new mouths a year, the biofuel industry will stay thirsty for crops, and Asia's growing middle class is keen to spend more disposable income to eat meat.
Presenter: Corinne Podger
Speakers: Climate and food resources expert, Professor Snow Barlow, of the University of Melbourne
BARLOW: I don't think it's a food crisis, it's really about rising food prices. I think fundamentally the world probably at this point can still produce enough food for all the people on the globe. But it's a matter of distribution and that distribution is often economically determined, so that if people can afford to pay the price of meat that consumes a lot of grain there'll be other people who may be quite disadvantaged by this. So it's not essentially a food crisis, but it will have ramifications around the globe according to the socio-economic status of nations.
PODGER: We're already seeing that in Bangladesh for example which is asking for food aid to combat rising food prices there. On top of the factors you've already identified, you've referred to climate change as a fourth variable - and your particular focus here in Australia in recent years has been the wine industry, which is particularly sensitive to changes in climate temperature and weather. Are you seeing shifts in weather that worry you in terms of what it means for the producers of foodstuffs?
BARLOW: Yes we are. The wine industry is if you like a canary in the coal mine as far as climate is concerned. Wine is particularly, or the quality of wine is particularly sensitive to variations in climate, and that's why of course there are particular vineyards and the French word "toir", which is the matching of climate, soils to particular wine styles. So there are some worrying signals, and in saying that rarher than say you know the industry is over as we know it, that's not true. But it's very important that these particular agricultural industries are aware of the changes in climate that have begun to happen and will continue to happen, and what the ramifications for those industries are. And for the wine industry it means that where 60 per cent of Australia's wine is perhaps produced in those large inland irrigation areas - the MIA around Griffith, the Sunraysia around Mildura, and the Riverland - those areas will be at least a degree hotter in the next 20 years and by 2050 will be probably two-and-a-half degrees hotter. And that puts them over a range where to produce quality wine with the current varieties will be very difficult. So they have some decisions that they'll have to make about how they choose to adapt to that climate. Whether they choose to create vineyards in other environments that are cooler, or whether they choose to perhaps change the varieties that they grow, and use varieties that are more suited to these higher temperatures.
PODGER: Now wine of course is for most people a luxury, but food certainly isn't, what kinds of adaptations do you see farmers needing to make to produce enough food to at least get our prices to level off if not come down a bit?
BARLOW: I think we've still got great potential to actually produce wheat in areas that will have less rainfall. And there are some areas again that are under research at present producing better varieties that are more drought-tolerant. Now obviously there's some limit to that in the future, but I don't think we've reached those limits yet. And some of those are GMOs, but some aren't.
PODGER: Genetically modified organisms?
BARLOW: Yes, and there are also sophisticated radio-isotope methods, this is the stable isotopes not radioactive ones, that can be used to determine the water use efficiency of plants that have been found by Australian scientists, which allow you to select more water use efficient plants and that is already happening, and greater efficiencies something in the order of 15 to 20 per cent have been achieved. So there still are some techniques and hope there that through better science in a sustainable way we can actually stabilise the wheat yields and they're the major cereal in Australia under these drier conditions.
PODGER: Now that kind of research takes funding, if you're a farmer and you need to switch to a new crop for example or a new variety of crop you might also need new infrastructure. What kinds of funding decisions need to be taken in Canberra to look after that, to fund all that?
BARLOW: I think we're all hopeful at present that with a new government that at least recognises climate change that we can then move to a policy environment which might recognise in the first instance what is required to allow Australian farmers to adapt to climate change. And that's the big challenge at present. And first we need some good research, this sort of research won't take an enormous amount of time, but to look at what the alternatives and what the best adaptation options are, and then I think and I hope that our government would then see that there might need to be policy initiatives that can help those changes happen because some of them might be quite big changes, others will be smaller. But that will probably require some government intervention and incentives to allow people to change before they absolutely have to.
