COVID-19 may have presented the Australian agriculture industry with many challenges, but it did also have at least one benefit - giving the public an understanding of the concept of biosecurity.
Both State and Federal biosecurity measures were covered during a presentation titled 'Are our plant biosecurity measures up to the challenge (are we COVID ready)?' at the Grains Research and Development Corporation's Grains Research Update in Perth on February 23.
During the presentation, Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) chief plant biosecurity officer Sonya Broughton said that as a result of the coronavirus the public really understood what biosecurity was for the first time, even if they might not have realised that's what it was.
"The public could see that if people were either not let into the country or were screened before they came in, then that was a great way of keeping COVID out," Dr Broughton said.
"That's very similar to what we do in terms of plant biosecurity, we screen things before they come in to make sure there are no biosecurity risks and if we can't do that, then there are other steps we need to take."
Dr Broughton referred to plant biosecurity as the Swiss cheese model of risk - if there are holes in slices of cheese, things can get through, but the more layers of defence there are, then the less likely it is for something to get through.
No single layer of cheese, or defence, is going to be effective on it's own, so there needs to be multiple layers.
"As an example, the khapra beetle is a big threat to the grains industry - it's number two on the national top 42 pests and diseases," Dr Broughton said.
"The first step of defence is knowing what the risk is, so in this case we know how it could possibly get in and we do surveillance for it at high risk areas, as well as asking the public and industry to do surveillance.
"If there is an incursion of it, we do forward and backward tracing eradication, similar to what was done when there was a positive COVID case."
Last year, CSIRO released a report, titled Australia's Biosecurity Future: Unlocking the next decade of resilience, which highlighted an increasing trend of incursions and outbreaks.
However, those outbreaks were not just across agriculture but also in humans with the likes of SARS, Ebola and COVID.
Those outbreaks are due to a range of factors including growing levels of trade, urbanisation, climate change and biosecurity loss.
Dr Broughton said the report showed that between 2012 and 2017, the intersections of biosecurity risk materials at the border rose by 50 per cent.
"Since 1994, there have been 20 species of the top 42 detected in Australia, of which six incursions have been successfully eradicated," she said.
"The number of incursions is more frequent than it used to be - we're averaging at least one exotic incursion per year and sometimes that can be as many as four, as was the case last year.
"Once we get something that we can't eradicate, it could become a problem for either the industry or public to deal with and the report showed that the cumulative burden of pests and diseases is also increasing."
In WA, there are a variety of pests and diseases that aren't on the national radar - Queensland fruit fly is a really good example as it's present in the east but every time it is detected in WA, an eradication campaign is mounted.
"We know that if we pick things up early enough we at least have a chance of eradicating it, depending on what the biology of the pest or disease is like, but once it's established, it's too late to try for eradication and there are no options left," Dr Broughton said.
"Fall armyworm was spreading incredibly quickly - it started in Africa before moving across to Asia, down through the Torres Strait then into Queensland and spread from there across the country and into WA.
"Russian wheat aphid was already present in South Australia and once it was detected it was widespread, so once it was found in Esperance, we knew there wasn't much else we could do except for trying to figure out where the aphid was."
In its report, CSIRO concluded that the business as usual approach isn't going to work as even if the investment into biosecurity was tripled over the next 10 years, there would still be an increased biosecurity risk.
With that in mind, CSIRO has three themes which it has chosen to focus on - system connectivity, shared responsibility and science and technology.
"System and connectivity is around digitisation and enhanced data sharing to identify and manage merging risks," Dr Broughton said.
"The shared responsibility theme is about improved community engagement and working with industry to develop their roles in surveillance.
"That is something that has been pressed nationally and we're trying to get industry to load data into a database that is maintained by Plant Health Australia called AusPestCheck."
The last theme, science and technology, is based on developing new methods of detection, surveillance and diagnostics.
In 2020, 67pc of khapra beetle inceptions were suspected to have been caused by contaminated sea containers and about three million of those are received each year in Australia.
Some producers were under the impression that the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment were inspecting every sea container, but that's impossible, so new and improved methods of detection are necessary.
On a State level, DPIRD has developed reporting tools - My Pest Guide and Pest Facts - that are for use either by the public or by industry.
My Pest Guide was developed using Royalties for Regions funding and is being considered for national adoption, with other jurisdictions around Australia interested in using it.
