Policy Forum #2
Comments on Sustainability, Landcare and Regulation
Phil Price, Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation
Dear Dave
Thank you for e-mailing to me a copy of SEA News; this is a great idea and a good way to develop a forum to explore a range of issues related to sustainable agriculture. There are a couple of points I would like to raise in response to your first edition.
The topics of sustainability, extension and the role of the landcare movement, etc., are mentioned several times. I would like to suggest that we have not as a community yet really focused on the key issues in sustainability and sustainable agriculture, and that the landcare movement, while it has been very successful at raising awareness, also runs the risk of dealing with the symptoms rather than the causes of unsustainability. I would like to suggest further that all of the current agricultural systems in Australia, at least in the south of the country, are unsustainable in ecological terms and are not likely to ever be sustainable, no matter how much we fiddle around the edges. The central issue, as has been outlined by Ted Lefroy and others, is that current cropping and pasture systems are unable to make full use of rainfall over the year, and consequently leak water (and nutrients, salt, DOC etc) when compared with the natural ecosystems that they have replaced. The crop and pasture plants we have at present are poorly-suited to the characteristics of Australian agricultural environments. Sustainable agricultural systems must be able to use rain where and when it falls, because except in specific situations where it is possible to move water laterally at some speed before it drains through the profile, alleys and agroforestry plantings will not be able to mop up the excessive water remaining unused by current plant systems. This suggests that if our goal is ecological sustainability, we need to change our thinking in order to take the environment (and particularly its water availability) as a given, and to redesign plants and agricultural systems to fit in with the environment rather than the other way around. This has substantial implications for what Australian agriculture might look like in 20-30 years’ time. It also suggests that the current focus of landcare, for example on planting strips of trees to reduce salinity when the surrounding 100 ha paddock contains plants incapable of using the water available, is not likely to be effective in the long run.
As you may know, CSIRO and LWRRDC have recently commenced a small research program which attempts to compare natural and agricultural plant systems in terms of their abilities to use the available water and nutrients. The three main objectives of this R&D program are to examine:
While we recognise it is important to maintain the productivity and competitiveness of current agricultural systems, this Program provides an opportunity to think more in the long-term about the future of Australian agriculture. Identifying the required crop and pasture plant parameters, that could be fed into breeding and bioengineering programs, is intended as an important outcome of the new Program.
The second item I wish to raise concerns the paper on "Adoption of Sustainable Farming Practices – Social and Economic Challenges". The newsletter summary lists four important challenges, but they seem to be based on an assumption that sustainable agriculture and changes in farming practice are purely voluntary. While there may be benefits in such a system, and it is probably the preferred route for most farmers, an examination of the context of agriculture in the northern hemisphere (and closer to home in the Murray-Darling Basin, for example), suggests that voluntary action will not be the sole, and perhaps not even the main, driver. In addition to farmers’ own needs and perceptions, farming practice will also be driven to some extent by the expectations of the Australian community that farmers will manage the nation’s natural resources in a sustainable manner, and by the requirements of processing industries and export markets for some way of assessing the environmental soundness of production systems and their products. If Australian agriculture moves along this track, then legislation and regulation governing the use and health of natural resources, together with industry-based environmental management systems, codes of practice, audits and so on, will provide an important part of the context within which individual farmers make their decisions.
The development of cross-compliance is another important topic. In future, public finance for sustainable management practices (which provide public as well as private benefits) may be provided only to those farmers who can demonstrate a sound property plan based on resource capability, with an environmental monitoring system and adaptive management in place. This concept may not be popular with many farmers, but the public may need convincing that programs like landcare and the NHT are a good use of limited funds. Cross compliance, to which many in the secondary and tertiary industries are already subject, as well as market demands, are likely to provide significant drivers of change in agriculture as well as the desire to improve profitability outlined in your paper.
You are welcome to edit and publish these comments in SEA News if you wish; the choice is entirely yours.
Thanks once again for putting this excellent idea into practice. I look forward to seeing more editions.
Phil Price
Thanks for your support Phil and for your insightful comments. The only point I wish to respond to is that of voluntary adoption vs regulation. It is true that the context I had in mind in the paper you mention was not strongly regulatory. However, if you are correct in forcasting a more directly interventionist approach by governments (and you may well be correct), I believe that the issues I raised regarding farmers awareness, perceptions and objectives will still be important in shaping farmer behaviour. Compliance with the sort of regulation you are forshadowing is by no means automatic (another lesson from northern-hemisphere experience!), and the best way to consider its likely impacts is to see regulation as just one of the factors influencing the farmer's decision problem. The influence of regulation may be strong enough to make adoption preferable to non-adoption, but depending on the penalties and/or incentives in place, and the perceived effectiveness of enforcement, it may not as well.
Dave Pannell
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