Blueprint's R&D push

The highly anticipated plan was unveiled today by NFF President Jock Laurie and CEO Matt Linnegar at the National Press Club in Canberra before leading politicians, key industry stakeholders and national media.

The document is designed to be a road-map for the sector’s future and arrives after 16 months of extensive consultation, with input from about 4000 people throughout the nation’s entire agricultural supply chain.

The Blueprint lists seven key priority areas for the sector’s future, with increased R&D investment named as a high priority, and better extension work, to bolster innovation and arrest flagging productivity.

Other priority areas include competitiveness, trade and market access, and natural resources.

The NFF Blueprint says R&D funding has been stagnant since the 1970’s – apart from an investment spike in 2001 – which has severely affected the sector’s productivity growth.

The document says there’s a time lag of several decades for the impacts of R&D investment to show up in agricultural productivity - but ABARES has identified a downturn in total factor productivity growth in the mid-1990s.

“This slowdown has probably been caused by a combination of adverse seasonal conditions and stagnant public R&D expenditure since the late 1970s,” the NFF Blueprint says.

“This stagnation is cause for serious concern.

“The ABARES report concludes that although R&D is just one factor contributing to agricultural productivity growth, the innovations needed to address changing climate conditions and future resource constraints in 2050 and beyond are likely to result from investments made in agricultural R&D today.”

According to the Productivity Commission, the funding for national rural R&D spending in 2008-09 was about $1.5 billion.

Public funding accounts for about 75 per cent of that amount and the remaining 25pc is provided by farmers through their R&D corporation levy arrangements and other private sources.

To arrest the slide, the Blueprint calls for the development of a policy and taxation environment that encourages private and philanthropic co-investment in R&D.

The NFF plans to reflect the Blueprint’s key priorities by lobbying for increased R&D spending, in the lead up to the September 14 federal election.

Mr Linnegar says specific details are being finalised, but the peak farm lobby group will demand an end to the recent trend of cutting government R&D spending on agricultural research in consecutive budgets, which is threatening future productivity and innovation.

NFF will seek an overall increase in government R&D spending from two per cent to 3.5pc GDP over two to three years.

“We either invest more in R&D, both public and private money, or else we face a slide in agricultural productivity and that’s not good for anyone,” he said.

Mr Linnegar said the Blueprint document wouldn’t signal the end of discussions held over the past 16 months, or provide all of the answers to questions raised during the consultation process.

He said the Blueprint was only a starting point that expressed the sector’s collective priorities, to safeguard their futures and give the NFF greater focus and a louder voice when lobbying government.

To that end, he said the NFF has also unveiled details of an additional ongoing consultation process, involving all industry stakeholders, not just its 26 member groups.

The extension process aims to ensure the Blueprint remains an active document and is not doomed for life at the bottom of a bureaucrat’s filing cabinet.

Mr Linnegar said the Blueprint’s ongoing forums were vitally important to the industry’s future, with the first two to be held this year.

He said the forums would involve the same processes used to develop the Blueprint, with all members of the sector’s entire value chain invited to participate.

The first of this year’s forums is likely to be held in Canberra and after that could potentially involve meetings in regional areas, throughout the nation.

Mr Linnegar said 168 different industry organisations and other concerned groups in the “value chain” had already expressed interest in being involved in the ongoing Blueprint forums.

“The forums are about identifying the critical issues first and committing to a process to make them happen in future,” he said.

“The Blueprint will identify the key issues and some of the solutions, but it won’t be the end of the story.

“It can’t be.

“Those strategies will need further work and buy-in from industry and government to make them happen, so it’s really the start of the story.”

Mr Linnegar said farmers and their representative bodies were often “far too reactive” to situations they faced, like seasonal challenges or government decisions that impacted viability.

He said the sector needed to become more proactive and the Blueprint would help achieve that goal through the ongoing forums, uniting industry to action solutions.

The Blueprint is an NFF initiative in partnership with Westpac, Woolworths and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.