Els Wynen

e-mail: els.wynen@elspl.com.au website www.elspl.com.au

Poster paper at the 13th IFOAM Conference, Basel, Switzerland, August 2000

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Funding for research in organic agriculture in Australia has started to increase over recent years, and policies on research needs have increasingly become the focus of attention. Research funding and topics in Australia are analysed in this paper, and compared with those in other countries such as the European Union (EU) and the United States (USA).

Source: ABARE (1999). n.a. = not available.

Most of the publicly funded research into agriculture in Australia is dispensed via Research and Development Corporations (RDC) which serve a particular industry, such as the Grain RDC, and the Dairy RDC. Each farmer is levied a certain percentage on farm gate production (usually around 1 per cent). This is administered by that RDC which looks after the research needs of the particular industry. The Commonwealth of Australia matches those contribution, usually dollar for dollar. For example, of the ECU 48 million spent on research by the grain organisation (GRDC) in 1998-99, ECU 24 million came directly from grain growers and the other half from taxpayers. Therefore, money to be spent by the different RDCs varies with returns to farming in each year. For example, in 1996-97 the GRDC had only ECU 36 million to distribute, with ECU 12 million more two years later. The main RDCs related to farm enterprises spent approximately just over ECU 100 million per year in total.

Apart from the commodity-specific RDCs, there are also some general RDCs, such as the Land and Water RDC and the Rural Industries RDC. For organic agriculture, the existence of non commodity-linked research funding is important, as the large commodity corporations are mainly interested in conventional agriculture. Research funding for organic agriculture has been easier to obtain from RIRDC in the past, and since 1996-97 this organisation has a sub-committee devoted to organic agriculture. In 1998-99 it spent 1.3 per cent of its budget on organic projects, with similar amounts in the previous year and earmarked for the following year (1999-2000). If this is the only money spent in Australia on organic research, this would make approximately 0.1 per cent of the total research budget in agriculture. It is possible that other R&D corporations do fund some organic projects, but they are difficult to track as there is no special program for organics, and many non-organic projects are included under their heading of 'organic'. For example, the GRDC has spent up to ECU 150,000 on 'organic' agriculture in 1998-99, but this category includes projects such as 'effects of organic and inorganic forms of sulphur...'.

Wynen and Vanzetti (1999) analysed funding of organic research in Europe. Actual expenditure in the EU and 3 other European countries (Lampkin et al. 1998) was related to the value of agricultural production in each country, taking 2 per cent of the total product value as a basis to be spent on research. The conclusion from this analysis was that for most countries for which data were available, expenditure on research into organic agriculture was (often far) less than 1 per cent of this basis. Funding levels for organic agriculture, relative to total agricultural returns, are most significant in Scandinavia. There, all four included countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland) showed more than 1 per cent of the base spent on research in organic agriculture, with over 5 per cent in Sweden.

Wynen and Vanzetti (1999) quoted Lipson (1997) in the USA reporting on organic projects in the USDA constituting 0.1 per cent of the total of USDA projects (for a definition of the projects, see below). These received slightly less than 0.1 per cent (US$1.5 million) of the annual research and education budget. In 1988 the Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture Program (LISA) was implemented. Although not strictly organic, many consider this a more acceptable form of alternative agriculture in the USA. Funding for organic projects is undoubtedly less easy to obtain due to the presence of this program.

In summary, although the production phase of organic agriculture commands a large part of the research budget in Australia, other topics, such as the provision of information, knowledge gathering about conversion and marketing also get a fair slice. The percentage of projects actually carried out now and in the past show a picture of overemphasis on communication and extension. However, the currently available data do not include financial data, and it is therefore not possible to make a firm statement about the correlation between budget and actual expenditure on research in organic agriculture in Australia.

In the USA, a comprehensive study on research into organic agriculture was made by Lipson (1997). In that process, the US Department of Agriculture’s database (Current Research Information System) was analysed for research projects relevant to organic agriculture. Only those projects which were relevant to organic agriculture, both in content and context, were included. In other words, projects that focussed on, for example, the integration of non-chemical methods such as cover crops into a conventional farming system were not included. Five different categories were discerned within the category of 'strong organic' (including projects where the application indicated explicitly an organic farming setting or application). 267 projects were weakly organic, which meant that the organic context could only be inferred. The majority of projects in organic agriculture identified focussed on bio-control, especially projects that investigated the introduction of biocontrol organisms from an external source. The number of projects, and the percentage of total number of projects, are shown in Table 3.

Funding for research in organic agriculture in Australia, as in the USA, is rather minimal, especially as compared with Scandinavian countries. Australia puts a high priority on communication and education of knowledge in organic agriculture, in particular on the topics of conversion and farm production methods, more so then what seems to be the case in the EU and the USA. If the number of projects in each category is anything to go by, then the importance of information transfer is even more pronounced than the budget of the Australian RDC most heavily involved in funding of organic agricultural research would suggest.

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European Commission (1997), 'The Agricultural Situation in the Community', Brussels.

Griggs, A. (2000), ‘Research and Development of Organic Agriculture in Australia: A Review’. Report published by the Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment, Hobart, Australia.

Höök (1997), ‘Ecological agriculture and horticulture production - Research in seven European countries’. Report prepared for the Swedish Council for Forestry and Agricultural Research, Stockholm.

Lindenthal, T., Vogl, C. and Hess, J. (1996). Forschung im Oekologischen Landbau, Bundesministerium für Land- und Forstwirtschaft, Austria.

Lipson, M. (1997), 'Searching for the o-word', Organic Farming Research Foundation, Santa Cruz, California, USA.

RIRDC (1998), 'R&D Plan for the Organic Produce Program 1998-2003', Canberra.

Wynen, E. and Vanzetti, D. (1999), 'Research in organic agriculture - Assessment and future directions'. Invited paper for the Conference: 'Organic Agriculture faces its development - the future', organised by the Jacques Cartier Centre, Lyon, France, December.