It is budget week and the government has promised a $5.3 billion five-year program designed to lift research and development and put the "nation's innovation system" onto a more commercial footing. The fine print, however, should have included a disclaimer explaining that in the agricultural and environment areas the innovation must be zero risk and also perceived to be zero risk.
Given the precautionary principle, and well funded activists who are quick to label new technologies anti-environment, commercialising agricultural R&D can be difficult.
The extent to which the national psyche has become captured by environmentalism is evident in The Australian newspaper's "Saving the Murray" series. Journalist Amanda Hodge was awarded a United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Award for promoting "understanding and resolution of environmental issues" through a story that included the following data-free assessment of technology and the Murray River. "Bridled by dams and beggared by progress ... the Murray's health has deteriorated in direct proportion to the increasing importance of its resource to the nation's economy", she wrote.
Using Hodge's logic, last summer's record wheat harvest must have been another blow to the river's health!
The reality is that the Murray is an old river flowing through a semi-arid environment of "droughts and flooding rains". Technology, however, has allowed us to store water and keep the river flowing even during extreme drought.
Biotechnology offers the potential for crops to be grown in the Murray-Darling Basin that are more drought tolerant. There is currently a research program at the South Australian-based Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG) focused on drought tolerance and the related problems of high soil boron, salinity and frost tolerance.
Frost tolerance has become an issue because plant breeders have been selecting for early maturing varieties in order to escape potential summer drought. But, this has now exposed crops to frost during flowering.
As an example, there is variation for all these traits in the "crossable" gene pool for wheat and barley, but there are far better genes in other plants and these would need to be transferred via GM methods.
This is where the commercialisation problem is likely to begin and end.
The Victorian government claimed, and still claims, it wants to be the biotechnology capital of the world -- but in the laboratory.
There appears no clear path for the commercialisation of GM food crops in Victoria or any other State (with the possible exception of Queensland).
In my view this is a direct consequence of the very successful anti-GM, anti-technology, anti-innovation Greenpeace campaign.
In New Zealand, anti-GM sentiment was very strong and so a confused government held a royal commission into the issue. The commission found that GM is not inherently dangerous; that New Zealand could not afford to ignore the potential benefits of the technology, and recommended the lifting of their moratorium.
In 1988 Australia was the first country to release a GM organism, a successful crown gall bacterium to prevent the disease of roses, apples, pears and peaches. Since then, we have made only one other release, GM cotton, first planted in 1996.
Australia has been a secular, rational nation with efficient agricultural industries able to develop and adopt state-of-the-art technology.
On the basis of quasi-religious belief and prejudice, however, State Governments are now imposing bans on technologies that promise improved yields while reducing environmental impacts. At risk is our international competitiveness.
If we want to stay technologically advanced, government research funding might be useful, but there is a more desperate need for leadership.
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