Building blocks for better biosecurity

The Australian Farm Institute 's quarterly Farm Policy Journal delves into a different policy topic with each issue. The Winter 2024 edition focuses on the resources required to ensure our Australian agricultural biosecurity systems are future-proof in an ever-changing climate. This editorial provides a precis of the journal articles, which are available on AFI's website for subscribers or for purchase as individual articles or an entire edition.

As an island nation, Australia’s biosecurity exists in a dichotomous state of extreme vulnerability and innate protection. While we are able to exert a significant degree of control over the movement of people and cargo across our borders, it is impossible to check every person and every box – and there is nothing we can do about the windborne biosecurity threats carried across the waters into an unpoliced interior.

Climate change creates additional pressures by altering the geographic distribution of pests and diseases both within and around Australia’s boundaries, and there is no room for complacency in managing and mitigating this present threat.

As with planting a tree, the best time to improve the resourcing of biosecurity was 20 years ago, but the next best time is today.

Thanks to the shared experience of the COVID-19 pandemic biosecurity is one of the few agricultural risks which people outside the sector are highly attuned to, yet Australia has (according to our own Government) “never had sustainable and predictable biosecurity funding”.[1] The National Biosecurity Strategy acknowledges the imperative to “develop long-term sustainable biosecurity funding and investment approaches … that recognise the value of government, industry and the community investing in biosecurity to support the system’s growing needs and priorities.”

As with planting a tree, the best time to improve the resourcing of biosecurity was 20 years ago, but the next best time is today. In the face of increasing threats to agricultural viability in Australia we must urgently address not only the funding models to support current and future efforts, but also the means by which we prosecute biosecurity concerns.

One response to redress funding needs is the proposed Biosecurity Protection Levy (BPL), which would require primary producers to contribute 6% of the biosecurity budget. The BPL raises questions not only of responsibility and burden on the Australian agricultural sector, but also on the sustainability of biosecurity resourcing models beyond financial cost. What methods could increase financial, infrastructure, intellectual, human, social and natural capital to deliver a robust, future-proof biosecurity system for Australian agriculture?

Australia’s next biosecurity incursion is a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’

The papers in the Winter 2024 edition of the Farm Policy Journal take a critical look at policy design and offer insights into new ways of addressing the resources required. Common themes across the articles include an expectation that Australia’s next biosecurity incursion is a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’, criticism of the BPL’s design and the importance of investing in human and technological capital.

The first article focuses on using shared values to facilitate lasting behaviour change across the stakeholders who share responsibility for biosecurity management. Authors Jake Fountain, Jennifer Manyweathers, Victoria Brookes and Marta Hernandez-Jover note that the decline in biosecurity extension funding and services has increased the burden of the individual producer.

As the vast size of Australia limits our capacity for surveillance, bioexclusion (preventing the introduction of disease-causing agents to the farm) and biocontainment (preventing the spread of infectious agents within a farm) by individual producers could reduce the impact of disease pre-surveillance. Rather than increasing surveillance, the authors argue that extension and education to increase day-to-day biosecurity engagement for individual producers on the front line might be a more effective use of resources. As the common goal in agricultural biosecurity is to protect the health and wellbeing of plants and animals, taking a values-based, collaborative approach to extension will empower individuals to make decisions and foster stakeholder relationships, leveraging key values that motivate Australian producers: autonomy and trust.

Andrea Koch writes that the shift from the old ‘quarantine’, isolationist mindset to our current biosecurity system was formulated pre-technology tsunami – i.e. before the era of ubiquitous smartphones, remote sensing, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Australia’s biosecurity system, she writes, is thus not fit-for-purpose to protect our agrifood systems from future biological threats. We are in desperate need of strategically designed digital infrastructure to connect the various layers of the system and to enable the data flows necessary to assess, manage and reduce risks in real time. While recognising the roles of individuals within the system, Koch is adamant that such infrastructure should not unfairly burden or constrain farmers and supply chain actors.

Australia could lead the world in creating a new class of biosecurity infrastructure

If implemented well, this ‘digital enablement’ could see Australia lead the world in creating a new class of biosecurity infrastructure, empowering participants along the agricultural continuum. However, Koch notes, this opportunity requires adjustment of resourcing expectations and how responsibility is shared across Government, industry, and private partnerships.

The third paper by Saša Vanek and Robert Breunig, of the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, addresses perceived flaws in the design of the proposed Biosecurity Protection Levy (BPL). Drawing on their expertise in tax and transfer policy, the authors explain that biosecurity can be viewed as an externality (i.e. an indirect benefit or cost to non-market participants) which arises as a result of another party’s activities. The problem identified with the BPL in this paper is not in the intention to distribute costs within a shared responsibility model, but in the misalignment of the BPL policy design with key theoretical approaches to taxing externalities. Given that biosecurity protection represents a benefit to all Australians, the authors suggest instead to charge those parties who create the risks (such as importers and travellers), and/or to further fund biosecurity protection through general revenue.

Head of Grain Producers Australia, Colin Bettles reinforces industry disquiet with the BPL proposal in his opinion piece for this edition. Bettles asserts that while the levy was presented as consultative and inclusive policy reform, the announcement came as a shock to farming representative groups.

Australian farmers were asked under the BPL to make a ‘modest’ contribution via a new 10 per cent levy – in addition to existing compulsory levies. Yet if grain (and other) producers were going to pay 10pc more in levies, the value proposition for the application of these additional funds to increase protections for producers needed to be clear.

GPA was not alone in its ‘bewilderment’ on the proposal, and Bettles amplifies the calls of other agricultural advocates in urging the Government to ‘go back to the drawing board’ on the policy design.

Industry is ‘simultaneously putting its hand in its pocket while banging its head against the wall’

Northern Territory-based barramundi producer Dan Richards writes from a personal perspective on the threats of poorly implemented biosecurity policy. To guard against the inevitable, existential threat of imported disease, he writes, the Australian aquaculture industry is ‘simultaneously putting its hand in its pocket while banging its head against the wall’.

While the Biosecurity Act is intended to protect primary production businesses from environmental and financial damage, it permits the Government to ‘eradicate businesses and livelihoods’, he writes, in attempts to mitigate industry-wide harm. Richards argues that proactive protection at our borders is a much more cost-effective and constructive way to utilise resources than reactive (and unjustly punitive) measures.

‘Shared responsibility’ is a mandate to utilise all the resources we have – financial, infrastructure, technological, human and intellectual

Biosecurity excellence underpins Australia’s success as an agricultural exporter, and the ever-expanding global movement of goods and people increases the risk of biosecurity breaches. Not only could such breaches have a devastating economic impact to Australian farmers, they could also irreparably harm our environment and social systems.

The ‘shared responsibility’ principle of agricultural biosecurity is not just an exercise in cost-sharing, but also a mandate to utilise all the resources we have – financial, infrastructure, technological, human and intellectual – to protect the unique natural capital we depend on for a sustainable farming future.

[1] https://www.agriculture.gov.au/biosecurity-trade/policy/sustainable-biosecurity-funding