David Pocock doesn’t mince words. The independent senator for the ACT tackles issues head-on, whether he is playing a Test match or chaining himself to a digger in solidarity with farmers against the Whitehaven coalmine.
Now he has spoken out about the amount of agricultural chemicals used to produce food.
“I think there’s a growing awareness that we probably should be concerned about the level of pesticides in our food,” Pocock says.
“Having grown up on a farm where we used a lot of chemicals, that’s just the way things were. I have concerns about it. And I think we should be looking at ways to farm better. Humans are incredible when they actually want to solve problems.”
Pocock has an abiding interest in farming and agriculture’s relationship to the environment. He grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe and has a master’s degree in sustainable agriculture. That makes him a vital voice to watch in the Senate as the Albanese government seeks to negotiate on legislation concerning climate change, biodiversity credits and the end of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
Pocock says there is a growing awareness that chemicals are having an effect on humans and the environment. He compares arguments in favour of the herbicide glyphosate to those used to support the use of DDT.
“It’s 60 years since Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, and you hear a lot of the same arguments, you know – DDT – you see videos of them spraying schoolchildren and they say, that’s fine.
“You hear a lot of those same arguments. People who say that glyphosate has no effect, it’s totally fine.”
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the popular weedkiller Roundup and 500 other herbicide products. It is widely used by household gardeners and many farmers argue it is imperative to control weeds in order to reduce soil disturbance and stop soil run-off.
But the chemical is increasingly controversial. In the US, more than 100,000 people have brought cases against Bayer, alleging Roundup caused their cancer. Maurice Blackburn has now brought a class action in Australia against the chemical giant Monsanto, the original maker of glyphosate and which was taken over by Bayer in 2018.
The National Farmers Federation has maintained that the use of glyphosate allows minimum tillage farming that protects soil structure and nutrients and ultimately increases the storage of soil carbon.
Pocock is not calling for an outright ban. But he does believe agricultural chemicals should be used judiciously and the agricultural chemical industry should be more heavily regulated.
“Some of the ways we’re using glyphosate are crazy,” Pocock says. “To just spray it on crops to terminate them for harvest – that doesn’t seem like a great way to use chemicals.”
He acknowledges there is a balance between growing enough food to make it affordable for people on lower incomes while ensuring it is healthy. He buys from a “handful of farmers” because he knows their farming systems.
“I guess as a professional rugby player and politician on a decent wage, I can afford to do that. This is why I think our food system is … such a hard thing to deal with, it’s this massive beast.
“We’ve set it up where cheap food is not necessarily healthy food. It’s processed food. So, yeah, it can be seen as a luxury to be able to buy food from the farmers’ market where you have more of an idea [of] the farmers and know their farming methods.”
Pocock has no concrete policy plans on farming so far, but he sees a lot of potential in the National party leader David Littleproud’s carbon and biodiversity pilots, developed with the Australian National University, that would reward landholders for improving habitat on their land. The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, has committed to a similar scheme.
But he is wary about offsetting – regenerating one area to make up for environmental destruction in another – following a damning report by the NSW auditor general. It found the state government had failed to properly design core elements of its scheme and had no strategy for ensuring it helped protect the environment.
Pocock asks: “Do you want to incentivise investment and money to flow into conservation and better land management? Absolutely. Do you want to allow … [the] offsetting of the destruction of intact ecosystems? Looking at the evidence, you’d have to say no.”
For him, one of the biggest challenges in farming is building “landscape literacy”, which he describes as learning more about the land and managing it an an adaptive way.
“You’re managing a complex system. You simply can’t just apply a formula, and people like Charles Massy often [say] the hardest thing is to change our paradigms and the way that we think about land management.
“I think we’re seeing more and more farmers do that. And it’s a hard thing to do in farming communities.”
He says the prevalent view in farming is that it is harder to make money in a system that requires lower inputs, but those farmers who move away from chemicals also have lower costs on a continent that will be “one of the worst-affected by climate change”.
“[This is] somewhere where the average farmer has really lost 22% of their profits since 2000 due to climate change,” he says.
“I’ve read a lot of Australian farms are relying on a few good years to even out some very average years. How sustainable is that going to be?”
He believes Australia’s spending on conservation is too low given “crazy” rates of extinction and that is why incentivising farmers for land management is so important.
“We spend an absolute pittance on conserving, in a mega-diverse continent. It’s embarrassing how little we spend. And scientists are saying unless we start spending $1bn-plus a year, you can just kiss a lot of the species goodbye ... There’s no way around that.”
