Dr John Manners CSIRO QAAFI Science Seminar

The future looks generally bright for food and agribusiness both globally and in Australia. We are all well aware of the growing population and associated demand for food as well as the increasing wealth in our region creating growing export markets for safe, healthy and sustainably produced food.

Challenges that demand R&D responses also exist including, climate change impacts on productivity, emerging yield plateaus in crops, competing options for land use, and the need for nutritional in addition to food security, all of which require broad cross-commodity technology developments. Generally the new suites of tools available to the R&D community, especially those that harness new digital technologies and data science, engender optimism that these challenges will be met.

Public sector investment in agricultural R&D is declining in real terms but generally private sector investment is rising, which should boost industry outcomes. This buoyant market and technological outlook is attracting many new investors into the sector and generally there is no shortage of investment dollars for good ideas that are able to create value in agri-food markets in reasonable time frames.

In this presentation, I will use examples of science advances from CSIRO Agriculture and Food to chart our response to the opportunities and challenges above. I will also outline diverse pathways that are being developed to take agricultural research outputs to market and capture some of the value created back as investment into the ongoing research effort.