"And he gave it for his opinion that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together"

Swift: Gulliver's Travels

One is tempted to observe that politicians are little improved since Jonathon Swift penned these memorable words in 1726. Nor has the fundamental issue of human survival and prosperity -- how to feed ourselves sustainably – changed.

In fact, food, land and water security is bound to become more imperative in the decades ahead – and politicians, from the available evidence, remain largely impervious to the consequences. During the 20^th century the great issue of the human destiny was whether we would wreck civilisation with fearsome weapons.

In the 21^st century, the question is whether we will consume, pollute and populate ourselves into crisis.

The clear images of the New World Order, globalisation and the Asian economic boom paraded by many western leaders through the 1990s are already fracturing like a looking glass in the face of unassailable economic and social realities.

In a prophetic article entitled "The Coming Anarchy"; journalist Robert Kaplan explains how, in society after society, a state of war already exists between the haves and the have-nots. In many cities, and in some countries, this inarticulate rebellion of the poor, the angry and the dispossessed has already nullified, if not actually destroyed, government.

This revolt, writes Kaplan, "is occurring through...much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war."

The world map with which we grew up, with its neatly ruled borders and colourfully tinted nations is a fiction. It no longer exists, save in the minds of cartographers.

One of the many things it does not mark are the new cities, the festering mountains of hovels and shanties which have sprung up as satellites of the old cities. Places where gang rule and the AK47 are the only law, where cocaine and heroin are the life's ambition of ten year olds, where no school opens and policemen fear to tread. Where the privileged occupy fortified dwellings shielded by guard-dogs and electronic alarms.

To the western media, politicians and bureaucrats, says Kaplan, conflicts such as those of Rwanda-Burundi, Iran-Iraq, and Kosovo or between Hindu and Moslem extremists in India are merely the contemporary manifestation of age-old religious and ethnic hatreds. However in his argument these are not the triggers for conflict, but rather its symptoms and its pretexts.

The underlying causes are poverty and the lack of those key means of human sustenance: food, land and water.

The military scholar Martin van Crefeldt argues that the 400-year-old concept of war as a collision between states is today evolving into a thousand smaller, more vicious and ultimately destructive struggles between tribalised groups of warriors -- from slum kids to Chechens, from Serbs to Kurds to Timorese, from skinheads, Neo-Nazis and Hutu to Islamic Jihad and Shining Path.

The Peace Research Institute of Oslo, in a powerful new report, says that at the end of the 20^th Century the very character of war is changing. (PRIO 1999)

For much of this century, wars have been ignited and fanned by ideology – by political, religious, nationalistic and cultural differences. But in the last eight years – since the end of the Cold War – something dramatic has taken place. Of 103 conflicts round the world, the majority have been over those most basic resources for human survival: food, land and water.

Most of these conflicts have erupted in countries where population pressures are high – and there is too little food, land and water to go round. Most commonly, they break out in regions where agricultural development has largely failed. Areas which PRIO designates a "zone of turmoil" affected by a "vicious cycle of poverty, deprivation, poor governance and violence".

PRIO notes another, grim, feature of these new conflicts: whereas Cold War wars were largely directed at armies and professional soldiers, these subsistence conflicts often have women, children, the old and the harmless as their chosen victims. In many cases they involve deliberate genocide.

Their impact is felt worldwide: in floods of displaced refugees, in widening conflagrations engulfing otherwise peaceful nations, in rising demand for aid, for arms, in environmental crises, in shocks that jar the global economy and harm trade and jobs even in distant lands such as Australia.

The failure of agricultural development is no longer the Third World’s problem. It is rapidly becoming everybody’s problem because, today, no human being is untouched by its consequences.

Agricultural research is ceasing to be a backwater activity. It is fast becoming defence spending for the 21^st century, a primary investment in global security.

And both farmers and agribusiness are becoming front-line troops in the security issue of the new millennium.

By 2050 human numbers will swell from 6 billion to 9.5 billion. Five babies are now born each second, and just two people die. At this rate we add a new Australia to the world population every ten weeks. 98 per cent of this growth will occur in the world’s poorest nations. (UN)

The stress on the Earth’s resources of land, water, food, timber and energy will be inconceivable. Despite a global surplus of food, 82 nations are presently unable to feed their people.

World consumption of water is rising twice as fast as population. The International Food Policy Research Institute says the number of countries facing "water stress" will double over the next 30 years, and water is already looming as a major cause of future wars. (IFPRI 1997)

To take an example: India has threatened to divert the Indus. If carried out, this would deprive Pakistan of most of its food supply. Pakistan has warned such an act would spell war. Both nations are nuclear armed and ready. They have fought three times in the past 50 years.

Similar situations recur around the world. The water, which sustains Israel, comes from aquifers, which lie beneath neighbouring Jordan and the Palestinian State. Turkey is building 22 new dams across the headwaters of the Euphrates - Tigris, which feeds the warlike nations of Syria, Iraq and Iran. Water is now seen as a potential fuse to the Middle East powder keg. (IFPRI, 1996)

In Asia dams are rising on the upper Mekong which feeds Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Kampuchea. In Africa, Ethiopia and Egypt are in dispute over the upper Nile. Worldwide, there is irreversible decline in supplies and quality of ground water.

In China, where it takes 5000 kilos of water to grow a single kilo of rice, the mega-cities encroach on farmers' supplies at an alarming rate. Installing a flushing toilet in a city home consumes 30,000 litres extra water a year, and cuts rice output by enough to feed a Chinese family for a week.

The Philippines last year imported half a million tonnes of rice because it lacked sufficient water to grow a crop – the cities had taken it. Across Asia, deforested catchments are crumbling into the rivers, choking dams, polluting estuaries. Some rivers are so silted they no longer retain their floodwaters, leading to annual havoc.

In Asia, Africa and Latin America, salinity, acidity and structural decline are claiming farmland remorselessly. As rural populations grow throughout the developing world, poor people flood into the cities adding to urban problems, while poor farmers "eat higher up the mountain", slashing and burning the forests in order to eke a temporary and ultimately catastrophic living from the fragile uplands.

Thirty-eight per cent of the world’s arable lands are now seriously degraded, as are 21pc of its pastures. The area of forest has been halved and we continue to lose 16 million hectares every year. (IFPRI, 1995; Worldwatch)

Yet by 2020 world food output must rise by 70 per cent -- more than 800 million tonnes of grain -- or confront large portions of humanity with Ethiopian-style famines.

Even such a huge increase will only provide enough food for people at a subsistence level. To meet the legitimate expectations of billions for protein diets will demand vastly more.

Over the coming 30 years we must grow more food than in the whole of human history. That food must come from less land, using less water and with fewer inputs.

Regrettably the reverse is happening. Last year the world’s farmers harvested the biggest crop in history – 1,881 million tonnes of grain. Yet per capita grain supplies still fell. (Worldwatch Institute 1998)

By 2020, states World Bank Vice-President Ismael Serageldin, one in every four children will be malnourished as the global food gap continues to widen.

In the oceans, resources are dwindling as a result of human pressure. Eleven of the world's top 15 fisheries are in decline. (Worldwatch Institute 1998)

While the eyes of the world's media and leaders are riveted on the money markets of the world’s wealthy cities, they remain blind to the poverty, which affects the vast majority of people:

• the 800 million who go to bed hungry each night
• the 1.3 billion who are abjectly poor
• the 400 children who die every 15 minutes from malnutrition-related diseases. (CGIAR, 1997)

And they are blind to the implications this holds for future global stability.

The refugee tide is flooding. In 1970, some 3 million were on the march worldwide. By 1980, the number had risen to 10 million. A decade later, it was over 20 million. (UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 1993)

Today 27 million refugees have fled across international borders in their search for food, homes and security.

Behind these figures lies the cruel nexus of poverty, political chaos, economic failure and environmental devastation – a nexus which, in some regions, has become an endless cycle, spewing people out of ruined and lawless lands.

The pivotal issue for the early 21st century is whether we can sufficiently contain the explosion of poverty to avoid the gradual rending of the social and economic fabric of the planet.

• To avoid tidal flows of refugees fleeing eco-political disasters.
• To prevent outright war being fought over scarce resources.

Yet as every person at this event is keenly aware – there is a solution to this problem. The world has found it before – and now it must find it again. It is called rural development.

Rural development is the foundation of stability and progress in these largely rural societies -- places where three quarters of the populace works and lives on the land.

It may seem bizarre to advocate agriculture, which is plainly responsible for degradation of land and water, as a solution to the problem. Yet it is.

Unless we wish to fell every last living hectare of forest on the planet, ruin every grassland, lake and river, we have no other choice than to use science and farm innovation to triple yields from our best farm lands -- so the remaining wilderness may be saved for future generations.

Rural development is the only way that you can dissuade the rural poor from "eating higher up the mountain" and destroying their environment.

With better incomes for the rural poor you can defeat poverty. And if you can defeat poverty, you can prevent conflict and achieve more stable government.

With stable government, you can have medical services, education for women and children, family planning, access to capital for families, roads, public works, clean water, safe food.

If you break the vicious cycle of conflict, you can grow secondary industries in your cities, attract foreign investment, draw tourists, and protect your ecological assets.

A striking report by the Australian Institute of Actuaries (Cumpston et al., 1995) finds that in countries where per capita wealth now exceeds $US2500 a year something quite remarkable happens: if they are already democracies, they have an very strong probability of remaining so. If they are ruled by repressive regimes, they have an excellent chance of maturing into democracies.

The study also showed that most of the world’s civil wars and most of the nasty dictatorships occur in countries where poverty is endemic.

Conversely, in nations where incomes are rising, the transition to stable government and thus, to accelerated prosperity is noteworthy.

The US Central Intelligence Agency did a major study on why nations fall apart, in which it analysed more than 600 factors.

It found the clearest and most unequivocal predictor of nation failure is high child mortality. If the kids are dying, then strife and war are not far away. And high child mortality is, of course, the most obvious face of poverty, malnutrition and disease.

Paradoxically, poverty has another consequence: high birth rates. The desperate need to replace all those dying children. Yet, as country after country has successfully proven, the only lasting antidote to high birthrates is prosperity.

If people have enough money to live on and save a little for their old age, the economic imperative to have children wanes. Children become a cost instead of a source of income. Round the world, society after society is discovering that rising incomes lower the birth rate more infallibly than any other mechanism.

It is hard to avoid concluding that if we wish to curb population, we must raise prosperity for the broad mass of the people – and especially for the rural poor.

Yet, as if to justify Jonathon Swift’s disillusion with politicians, governments worldwide have been slashing the very thing which lays the foundation of prosperity.

World aid budgets fell from $US55 billion to $US47 billion in 1997. Aid to the poorest countries is at its lowest level in a decade. Globally, the aid commitment is now less than one third of the promise made by the 21 richest donor countries. (The Reality of Aid, 1998/99)

Of this shrinking pie an ever-diminishing slice – only 7.4 per cent – now goes to agriculture. Even the aid community, it seems, has forgotten that the solution to poverty is giving poor people the means to raise their incomes.

At home, politicians have cut rural research because of a belief it engenders surpluses or serves a sunset sector. Abroad, they have cut support for rural R&D because such aid is no longer fashionable.

The question is: Who is to rivet world attention on this issue - And how?

Perhaps it will be us. Perhaps it should be Australia.

Of all the nations on earth, only in Australia are the grains, fruits, vegetables and animals of six continents farmed. Here we husband the produce of Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and of Australia itself in a peerless diversity.

We grow these things under a wider range of climatic conditions and environments than any other nation.
We have agricultural and environmental scientists whose work, per capita, is more widely cited than any other in the world, who recently supplied the leaders of no fewer than five of the world's agricultural research centres.

We have farmers who are internationally efficient and who are leaders in the adoption of sustainable farming practices and new technology. Who practice a creed, revolutionary by world standards, in which communities work together to save and improve their environment -- a creed called Landcare.

We have an agribusiness sector, which is modern, efficient, high-tech and low cost, which spans more products and processes than almost any other.

Based on this unique endowment, Australia has the capacity to become world leader in sustainable food, land and water systems.

We have a good grasp of how to farm and care for the land under harsh and demanding conditions. We know how to breed and raise excellent crops and livestock, control pests safely, use biotechnology, handle, store and transport our produce, process and add value to food with advanced technology, market, wholesale and retail it. We are learning better ways to husband our soil, water and natural biodiversity.

When you put all this together, Australians understand more about the sustainable production of food under a wider range of conditions that any other people.

That knowledge is gold. It is our natural advantage. It will be our premier agribusiness export in the new millennium.

It is also the means by which we can help the world to curb growth in the human population.

In the century to come Australia will export not only foods of surpassing quality at competitive prices – but also the knowledge of how to grow and process them, ways to manage land and water sustainably, technology to beat pollution and fight degradation, superior strains of crops and livestock, managerial skills, education, marketing, communication. All the things Australian agribusiness already does so well.

Information is the gold of the 21st century. By 2010 world trade in information will exceed world trade in manufactures -- and vastly exceed world trade in grain. Bill Gates built a $US4 billion business, not on computers – but on the smart stuff that makes them work.

Australia must become the leading international supplier of the smart stuff about food, land and water. About the sustainable development of rural industries and communities, about ways to boost farm production, beat poverty and environmental decline – about all the know how that makes up agribusiness.

Australia badly needs a new high-value export industry, capable of earning enough for us as a nation to buy back our $236 billion national debt, to build a new road to prosperity.

That industry is knowledge, and at its core is the knowledge we are best at – food, land, and water.

The Australian agribusiness of the Third Millennium will be an exporter of ideas, solutions, technologies, skills, genetics, software, equipment as well as traditional products.

Mining knowledge already earns Australia $1 billion a year in exports – it is now close to outstripping cotton and may even overtake wheat by 2003. Why should agribusiness know how not do likewise?

Landcare alone could become a billion dollar export industry, made up of scores of small companies selling the seeds and genes of trees and shrubs, the technology, the machinery and equipment, the software, the advice, the science, the know how.

Given the problems emerging in the soils and waters of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Landcare know how could become Australia's bequest to the Earth.

Likewise freshwater management. The insights we are gaining about how to look after rivers and floodplains, lakes, irrigation systems and precious ground water under arid and semi-arid conditions is a priceless resource in a world acutely short of fresh, clean water.

By solving the problems of our neighbours, we will build reliable customers for the future.

Most of Australia’s exports today are sold to countries which, 25 years ago, could not afford to buy either food or technology from us. Yet with the rise in their incomes, they have become our best customers -- places like Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and China.

The take-home message is, if we wish to prosper we must find ways to ensure our customers are prosperous too.

There is no surer way to set a poor country on the path to prosperity that through sustainable rural development -- by supplying the knowledge which allows the broad mass of the people, not just the elite, to raise their incomes.

By supplying sustainable agribusiness know how to countries presently poor, Australia will guarantee for itself more prosperous customers in the future.

Furthermore we will do much to avert the misery, conflict, economic chaos and war which are consequent upon the degradation and scarcity of the earth’s resources. We will help to reverse the great cycle of population growth.