Tassie suits a wheat belt

Climate change hits food security

TASMANIA could become Australia’s new wheat belt because of the effects of climate change, a forum on the future of the nation’s food security has been told.

Speaking as part of an online Royal Institution of Australia briefing organised by Cosmos Magazine, Dr Angela Pattison, from the Plant Breeding Institute at Sydney University, said modelling was showing what climate change would do to wheat yields across the country.

“The edge of profitable wheat country now [in NSW] is around Walgett, but if climate change goes as predicted, it will be too high and too dry,” she said.

“The margin will shift east. In South Australia it will shift south, and in Western Australia it will shift west. Close to the coast, as a generalisation.”

But the same modelling showed some areas would become suitable for wheat farming, including Tasmania.

“At the moment Tasmania is too cold, with too many frosts, to grow wheat, but under climate change, the climate will be more favourable,” Dr Pattison said.

Dr Pattison said she was not advocating tracts of Tasmanian land be bulldozed for wheat crops, but using it as an example of how Australian agriculture would have to adapt to changing environmental conditions.

These changing conditions would have significant “economic and social consequences as well as the very obvious environmental ones”, she said.

Professor Rachel Burton, head of the Plant Science Department at Adelaide University, said some crops could not be easily moved, and this would inevitably force a rethink on using genetic technologies to help them cope with a harsher environment.

Some sectors of the population were not comfortable with genetically modified foods, she said, “but that’s the kind of technology we’re going to have to adopt, if we can’t move (crops)”.

But she also warned that even advanced gene techniques such as CRISP would not work on all crops, so there would still be a need for traditional breeding techniques for many plants.