Australia wants to turn its agricultural sector into a $100bn a year industry by 2030, a growth target of nearly 20%. But our reliance on pesticides compared with some of our major trading partners could see that ambition thwarted.
The pushback from UK environmental groups in recent months over the Australia-UK free trade agreement, because of Australia’s use of 70 pesticides banned in the EU, highlighted the risk.
The UK is by no means at the forefront of concern over agricultural chemicals. After the dramatic collapse of insect numbers over the last two decades in Europe, the European Commission has led the way on restricting pesticides linked to cancer or environmental damage and some countries such as France have gone even further, by limiting household use entirely.
Yet the federal government’s Ag2030 policy, released by the previous government in April, makes almost no mention of pesticides other than measures to make it easier to get agricultural and veterinary chemicals to market.
The policy notes that $9m has been provided to “expand access to safe and approved agricultural and veterinary chemicals for Australian farmers to use responsibly and as needed, to boost farm productivity and strengthen responses to pests and diseases”.
A further $25.3m has been allocated to help secure the supply chain for agricultural chemicals. More sustainable agricultural practices barely rated a mention.
How much pesticide does Australia use?
Surprisingly, figures are hard to come by and international comparisons are even more complex as they depend on the mix of crops, farming methods, type of pests and the climate.
At the global level, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says pesticides use in agriculture in the decade to 2020 had stabilised at 2.7m tonnes of active ingredients, But this followed a 50% increase over the decade to 1990.
That stabilisation was mainly due to the efforts of European farmers to reduce the use of pesticides because of health and environmental concerns.
Oceania (which includes Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific) has had some of the largest increases between 1990 and 2020. The region increased herbicide use from 20 to 41 kilotonnes (kt), fungicide use from 3 to 5kt, and insecticide use from 7 to 13kt a year.
The agricultural chemicals industry strongly defends the use of pesticides as vital to both the economic and agricultural health of the nation.
“The question people need to ask is how do we continue to produce food for the world,” said CEO of the industry lobby group Croplife Australia, Matthew Cossey.
He said people involved in urban food fads are fuelling a groundless chemical phobia. “These are safe and sustainable tools that you need to feed the planet.”
A Deloitte Access economics study for Croplife in 2015-16 estimated that $20.6bn of Australia’s $28.2bn agricultural output in 2015–16 was attributable to the use of herbicides and pesticides - or 73% of the total value of crop production.
The same study found that Australia uses nearly double the amount of crop protection products per dollar of production as the USA.
With pesticide resistance now a serious problem in Australia, a growing band of agricultural scientists say we need to start using technologies that reduce pesticide use and more carefully assess the environmental consequences.
A smarter approach
The regulation of pesticides has gone through a number of different phases. After World War II, DDT and other organochlorine pesticides were welcomed as a godsend by farmers, and were widely used.
But in 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, documenting the environmental harm caused by the indiscriminate use of these chemicals that were both persistent in the environment and affecting other animals in the food chain, including humans.
The result was a shift to other, more insect-specific chemicals, said Professor Andrew Barron from the school of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University.
“The good news is that these chemicals were less harmful to humans but 10,000 times more deadly to insects,” he said.
With the huge collapse of insect numbers in Europe, the concern has now shifted to the effects of low doses of these second generation pesticides on non-pests such as honeybees and on waterways and coral reefs.
But Barron, a bee expert, warns that banning one chemical such as neonicotinoids can sometimes lead to the use of alternative pesticides that are just as harmful.
“We may not get the result we want by banning one compound,” he said. “It’s a question of exploring several ways to use insecticides. We currently use them whether there is a pest outbreak or not. We could have a different conversation with the growers about only using chemicals when an outbreak is incipient.”
He also said it’s time to focus on encouraging natural enemies like spiders to live among crops or using diseases that target the pest as a bio control. These methods do not offer complete eradication, and are more complex for farmers, but they do offer a more long-term approach.
“We need to rethink our relationship with the environment and how we use pesticides. It’s like antibiotics: we know that if we overuse them we can do more harm than good, and so we use them very selectively.”
Philip Batterham, emeritus professor of Biosciences at the University of Melbourne, agreed it’s not a matter of stopping chemical use altogether. “Agricultural products and modern farming methods have been responsible for a stupendous lift in global yields of food, making it possible to feed world populations,” he said.
“We can’t do it with organic hobby farms. What we need is a new approach: how do we get the best deal, for the environment [and] for agriculture.”
He urges a far more rigorous scientific approach to farming methods and products that can reduce environmental damage.
Nancy Schellhorn, a former CSIRO scientist, who ran the CSIRO’s spatial ecology team conducting research into more environmentally sustainable methods of pest control, says it’s imperative we bring our use of pesticides in to line with Europe.
“Our stated goal is to turn agriculture into a $100bn industry. Our export partners like the EU will insist on traceability and trust,” she says. “We say we are clean and green but where is the evidence?”
Schellhorn is now CEO of a company making insect detection technology, known as Rapidaim. The traps are able to identify fruit fly and other pests and send a real time message to the farmer’s mobile phone to enable early targeted spraying.
There are many reasons to consider actively limiting pesticide use. The long term effects on the Australian environment are unknown and health problems associated with the first generation pesticides like DDT took years to emerge.
We need to take a far more precautionary approach to agricultural chemicals than we do now. We also need much better data on the environmental and health effects than we have now, so we can weigh the true cost of pesticides.
That requires leadership from government to fund innovation. And it means having a truly independent regulator, funded by the taxpayer, that can act to protect the public interest without relying on the financial support of those who it is charged with regulating.
Failure to wind back pesticide use ultimately will cost the Australian farming sector as other nations move towards creating a less chemical-dependent farming sector.
