RESEARCH and development results can take more than a decade to find commercial applications, a time lag that researchers warn needs to be shortened if Australia is to tackle global food insecurity and climate change.
Speakers at the University of Adelaide's Reframing the Agenda: Food Security to 2050 forum held at the National Wine Centre in Adelaide on Monday said drawing on R&D successes would be critical to feed the world in coming decades.
But United States University of Minnesota Science and Technology Policy professor Philip Pardey - a South Australian who graduated from the Waite Institute more than 30 years ago - said regulatory hurdles and slow market penetration were reducing the spread of new and more efficient crop varieties.
He said this was adding to research times, leaving decades to pass before new developments could be seen on-field.
"Increasingly in Australia and the United States now, we have regulatory hurdles to jump through, particularly with modern bio-tech crops," he said.
"So now you've not got just a research lag, you've got a regulatory lag in those crops that we didn't have 10-15 years ago.
"You're talking 7-10 years for most crops before you can commercialise it."
Prof Pardey said the distribution of new crops could also be dependent on how they were adapted to local agricultural circumstances.
"The uptake of modern bio-corn varieties in the US, for example, took 13 years to reach 80 per cent market penetration, compared with about 20 years for hybrid corn," he said.
"In the countries I'm working in, such as sub-Sahara Africa where you've got dysfunctional extension services, it can be much longer than that.
"That's the scale I'm talking about, and I'm worried because we've seen a ratcheting-down in Australia and elsewhere in the growth of R&D spending, so in a sense our future is already cast."
The results of Australia's current R&D spending would be felt strongest in 2020-30, creating a "policy dilemma" for economists.
"Personally I think there is not enough work going into scouting and adapting other people's technologies for your own purposes," he said.
Crawford Fund research study director Gabrielle Persley said Australians should build on the success of previous investments and look at ways of accelerating outcomes into practical uses.
"One of the real challenges that we should set ourselves is to try and halve the time it takes for R&D to impact," she said.
"We have to take a really good look at what research has been done and where the real opportunities are, to take potential technology through to development and speed up the process."
Living and working in Africa for the past few years had increased her sense of urgency on the issue.
"It's really important not to be designing things to death and be working on the 25th draft of some proposal," she said.
"We can set indicators for success along the way, but let's get on with it and do something now."
*Full report in Stock Journal, February 16 issue, 2012.
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