The head of Australia’s key farming lobby group says competition with the mining sector over water is the biggest issue facing Australian agriculture.
The National Farmers Federation (NFF) is today launching the first stage of its blueprint for Australian agriculture, detailing the major challenges and opportunities for the sector over the next 40 years.
“Obviously it’s going to be crucially important that politicians remember agriculture into the future and certainly have got some long-terms plans about how agriculture’s going to develop over the next 30 to 40 years, I suppose,” NFF president Jock Laurie told AM.
“You need to start putting some longer-term time frames on this, and what some of the impediments might be, and some of the things that you need to do to overcome some of those problems.”
Mr Laurie says governments across Australia need to “step up to the plate” to resolve issues with the mining sector.
“Federal politicians keep saying it’s a state issue not a federal issue, but the Federal Parliament needs to start setting some pretty clear parameters around what’s acceptable, what’s not acceptable,” he said.
“We’ve got to have a clear understanding about the impact of coal seam gas, for instance, is having on water, on aquifers, short-term or long-term.
“I mean the Australian agricultural industry very much relies on water for production and maintaining that production, and certainly when you’re looking at increasing food production by 17 per cent by 2050, the important role that water is going to play in that.”
The NFF over the years has developed a number of different policy documents, and Mr Laurie says his organisation plans to have a thorough involvement in the latest agriculture blueprint.
“There’s no point us just putting a document together that’s good for agriculture. We need to have all of the industry players involved in it,” he said.
“It is really crucially important that to get some sort of clear picture of where you’re going to go and how you’re going to get there, and it can be used by sensible governments.”
