Welcome And A Krill Win

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Good morning and welcome to Work on the Race. I'm your host, Carla and Marine Conservationist, Tanya Murphy. And joining me as always is Ken Aquarium's Marine Educator and Switch Whisperer, Brett Goodband. Now, Brett, I have some positive news to get our Friday off to a good start. For anyone who's not familiar, krill is a tiny crustacean that is a major food source for Antarctic wildlife like emperor penguins and wild stuff. But fishing boats from multiple countries are heading to Antarctica every year to get megatons of krill for the omega-3 supplement industry. Not only is this unnecessary, since omega-3 fatty acids can be obtained from other sources of activities, but it's also putting fresh air on the fragile antarctic acid. Environmental groups like state efforts have been complaining on this issue, and the efficacy of this to have worked, at least for these two major supermarkets. So that's a happy world because there are still plenty of other tools that sell full oil supplements for loved oils and happy states. But now it's time to introduce today's topic. In 2008, a 40% of the Matt Landos was filed to investigate a series of coin occurrences out of three categories surrounded by Macadonia files and those. In one incident, hundreds of thousands of 45,000. Other incidents documented by Dr. Landos include mass skills and speech suffering neurological consultants at that time speed. So what he discovered next made him into a vocal advocate for stronger pesticide regulation in Australia. He's also an adjunct associate professor at the University of Queensland School of Environment, and we're really excited to have him on the show today. Professor Matt Landort, good morning, and welcome to Word on the Reef.

SPEAKER_05 3:24

Good morning, Daniel and Brett. Thanks for uh the opportunity to chat.

SPEAKER_02 3:27

Yeah, welcome. This is going to be a great show. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

Yeah, it is great to have you on the show. So to start off, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

SPEAKER_05 3:36

Yes, certainly. So I uh graduated out of university way back now in 95

The Two-Headed Fish Mystery

SPEAKER_05 3:42

and uh moved into veterinary practice. Uh this was a traditional rural veterinary practice where I was working with dairy cows, cats, dogs, birds, and everything in between uh with fur and feathers. Yep. And I had held an interest in fish for quite some time. And as uh my career wound on, I injured my back working with too many cows, picking up their feet and pulling out their calves, and I decided I'd retrace my steps back to this interest I had in aquatic animals and uh took up a position with the state government, working as a fish veterinarian at a state government laboratory and operating some field research projects with the early phases of the aquaculture industry in New South Wales. And from then I moved on into developing my own private business, working with fish farmers and with wild capture fisheries and conservation groups around the impacts that are occurring in fish, how to keep them healthy, and how to have productive landscapes or productive farms to ensure that we get significant productivity out of our natural ecosystems and farmed ecosystems.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Amazing. Uh Professor Landos, when I was researching your work for this episode, I found out that you have an incredible amount of expertise on every type of water pollution and how that might impact things like fisheries, from sediments and algal blooms to microplastics, PFAS from our nonstick cookware and chemicals in our bathroom products. They're winding up in our environment, in our waterways, in our future. And I would love to get you back on our show again in the future to be able to cover so many of these things. But today I really want to focus on the pesticides. So let's talk about the fish hatchery in Noosa, where you were hired back in around 2008 to investigate mysterious fish health problems, including fish being born with two heads. So take us back to the start. What happened?

SPEAKER_05 5:36

Well, this was an instance where the phone rang and I answered and began inquiring with the usual kind of formatted, like a templated approach that through veterinary school you get trained in, in asking questions about what is the problem, where is it, which animals are affected, when did it start, trying to identify the timing of different effects, the types of symptoms that the animals were exhibiting, and exactly where that was taking place. This uh history collection, in this instance, documented a multi-year issue at this particular site that coincided with springtime, which is when this particular fish hatchery was spawning the native fish. So many of our native fish species are spring spawners. That's when they uh get reproductively active and were able to produce juveniles in fish hatcheries. This little hatchery was operating to restock areas where our natural productivity was no longer functioning. Places like dams where we put a great big wall across the river.

SPEAKER_04 6:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 6:41

This often stops fish breeding and populating these areas, and so we are able to breed and stock those areas with fish from hatcheries.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

So they were doing environmentally friendly

Matt Landos’ Path To Fish Health

SPEAKER_01 6:51

work then, breeding fish to restock the environment.

SPEAKER_05 6:54

Yes, and uh conservation work also. They were working on some threatened species like the Mary River cod, trying to uh ensure that we were able to conserve that species and in some areas look to repopulate areas from which they'd become extirped, in other words, disappeared from some areas of their former native range. So this uh little hatchery operation had been operating for many years, nearly twenty years, quite successfully producing fingerlings, but something changed at the hatchery, and the change coincided with the change in operations of their neighbour. The neighbor was a macadamia farm growing macadamia nuts, which are a delicious product, and formerly the macadamia farm was an organic farm. It changed hands and turned into a conventional farm, which involves the use of a range of pesticides to help try and improve the productivity of the crop or control pests and diseases in the crop. And that coincidence of timing is unfortunate that the spraying of macadamias and the flowering time is in spring at the same time that the fish are trying to breed. So we have a confluence of activities happening at the same time, where the most sensitive life stages of fish to impact from chemical exposure are the very earliest ones where cell division is happening. So where we're going from firstly getting fertilization of an egg, and then the cell division begins, going from two cells to four cells to eight cells, and then the embryo begins to try and organize itself where cells are literally sending tiny concentrations of chemical signals to each other to format the development of that animal, to say, okay, you cells go over there, you're going to become a fin. You go over there. And the animal begins to organize through this very early phase of development. And it's all happening outside of the fish. So it's different to us. Most of the fish uh don't incubate their embryos internally in their bodies, it's happening out in the water, and this means that they're very exposed to whatever ends up in the water. And so this is where uh this particular case drew us into looking what's in the water and what could be causing these embryos to become misshapen, deformed. So the two heads was one of the circumstances, but there were many other deformities in that we saw kails being bent, we saw the hearts becoming swollen, the little area around the heart becoming very swollen, and also impacts on the eye development in the embryos of these animals. Now, when uh you're a veterinarian, you can uh be drawn into looking very closely in more and more detail at a finer and finer scale. But I always like to make sure I bring my eyes up and look more broadly. And when I did that at this farm, a number of other things were happening. The owner herself was going periodically into agonal pain, abdominal pain, which was time coincident with sprain, where she would be literally in pain on the floor of her home. The doctor had considered what was happening, done some blood tests, found some changes to her liver function, and attributed it that she'd become sensitized to a particular class of chemical exposure. And it was leading to this very strong stimulation of her nerves, this reaction when she would get an exposure. The other problems were she had other animals on the site. She had horses, some of the horses started developing tremors, and another veterinarian went and saw those horses, a veterinary more familiar with equine practice, and they attributed it to an exposure to an excessive concentration of an organophosphate

Noosa Hatchery And Macadamia Spraying

SPEAKER_05 10:56

pesticide. So this is a neurotoxic pesticide, and they felt that the symptoms of the horses were neurological. Now that particular chemical has an antidote, and the veterinarian recognized the issue potentially and gave the antidote, which rapidly led to recovery in the horses. They returned to normal clinical behaviour, which is highly supportive of their diagnosis that in fact it was probably the chemical exposure that triggered the muscle tremors and the uh neurological behaviour in those horses. But there was more. There were pigs on the property that aborted their fetuses. There were chickens on the property that their toes, when you looked at the toes of the chickens, they were bent. Their feet had become deformed. There were dead honey bees lying on top of leaves. There were frogs where their hind limbs during development, so moving from being a tadpole to developing to become a frog, their hind limbs were deformed.

SPEAKER_02 11:57

Oh my god, next level, isn't it?

SPEAKER_05 11:59

So this broader collection of symptoms across an array of areas which were suggestive that something was wrong. It didn't tell us precisely what was wrong, but it gave us a direction to start asking questions about what could cause this confluence of things all in this one place to be happening. So we undertook a conventional investigation using laboratory sampling, sending fish off to the state government lab, working with a very experienced fish pathologist there, Dr. Roger Chong. And Roger was able to look at an array of samples because this took place over a couple of years, and we continued to send samples to Roger to ensure that we'd ruled out things like infectious diseases from the potential that they could have caused some or all of these problems. But we were able to rule out infectious diseases through this sampling, and the conclusion that came back from the laboratory is that what we were most likely seeing was the result of chemical exposure. So essentially a toxic response being observed in the animal. Now this was concerning because the state government had undertaken some work with the neighbouring farmer to check whether they were using the products according to the label of the products which had been approved. So these were not illegal products. The farmer, it's important to say the farm was not found necessarily by the government to be behaving illegally. They were following the label of a product which they'd been told was useful to apply to spray on macadamia orchards.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Well, I'm worried about that farmer. Is he okay? He or she? Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 13:39

Yes, if we scroll forward to today, I've have personal friends who are macadamia farmers who are now saying to me, Matt, way back then when you raised the alarm about risks to fish and flagging that we have a lot in common with fish as humans. Most of our biology is shared. So in fact, we evolved from fish. So we're more fish than most people think. We just crawled out of the water, really, and but our roots are certainly in the biology of fish. And many of those people now are very concerned because their colleagues in the industry are developing cancers, they're developing neurological degenerative diseases like Parkinson's disease. And around some of these intensive farming areas, we have elevated rates of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's. And we're not talking about trivial numbers here. This is very important to understand because I think we do need to bring economics into the discussion. Parkinson's rates in Australia are rising about four percent a year. Four percent. That's a lot. It's a very expensive condition, and I don't know anybody who has the disease who would put it on their bucket list. It is not a desirable disease. It's a horrible disease to live with, it's debilitating, it takes people out of the workforce, it means that we need to give them increased levels of care and try and find pharmaceutical and other medical support to help them through the course of the disease which can be very prolonged. So this is a very expensive cost on the health budget where people are developing neurodegenerative disease. Similarly with motor neuron disease, one of my colleagues at Macquarie University, uh Professor Dominic Rowe's been working on MND, and what he's finding is that there are correlations to pesticide exposure based on where people are that develop these diseases. The rates are not the same everywhere, and this is a clue that something in their exposure pattern is modifying their risk and increasing the risk that their neurological system can succumb to one of these diseases. So it's a real concern, and we're seeing it in real data that's coming out and being published across now multiple countries. So studies in France have shown elevated pesticide exposure increases Parkinson's. Studies in California, elevated pesticide exposure increases Parkinson's. So now we're getting some strength of evidence the science is building, where it's not just one study suggesting there's a link. We now have meta-analysis where people have taken a whole pile of studies and said, okay, let's assemble all of them into a giant data set. And what do they say? Well, they say that there appears to be a significant increase in risk if you have elevated pesticide exposure that you'll develop things like Parkinson's disease. So these are really important things, and at the time back in 2009, look, I wasn't across all of this. I hadn't been taught that there was an association or risk between Parkinson's and pesticide exposure. I've been taught that when you use things according to the label, they've been assessed. That's what I'd been taught. And I believed that my I thought my education was complete and I thought it was sound. But this case draw me into realizing my assumption needed to be really tested here. Was this actually safe? Because I had fish deforming, fish dying, and it appeared that it was correlated, and the epidemiology of the case was pointing consistently to there being an association with spraying and exposure to drift.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Wow. This is there's there's so much in this.

SPEAKER_02 17:38

I'm a bit worried now. Yeah. Because I um back a long

Deformities Across Animals And People

SPEAKER_02 17:41

time ago, when I was very, very early twenties, I got work on a massive seedling farm over in Western Australia. And I didn't realise it at the time because I didn't really know what was going on. This thing was like 20 football fields, it was massive. So we grew them from a seed to the seedling to about two inches, and then they went off to the farms and they grew tomatoes or whatever. And part of my job was to put a massive hazmat suit on and go into this shed and mix all of these chemicals into a big drop and then drive my tractor up and down these fields spraying it. And while this was happening, they couldn't do it when the wind was going in a certain direction because it would blow over to other farms, and no staff could be out there, and then I'd have to walk through these massive igloos that are about five hundred metres long in another four hazmat suit and spray more chemicals. That was my job. And I wasn't even allowed to go home until I had a proper shower, and they destroyed all the hazmat stuff each day. And I was thinking to myself, Crack, you know what I mean? But in my very early twenties I was pretty naive because I'm getting good money with the price, so they want me to chuck it on there. But then every now and then when you nick that sneaky grape when you're walking around Wooly, I'll just have that one. Shove it in because you don't watch it, and then you get that horrible fairy taste in your mouth.

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Yeah, wash your wash your tomatoes, wash your grapes, scrub your wash your or junkies.

SPEAKER_02 18:53

As we were saying, grow it yourself.

SPEAKER_05 18:55

So washing can help reduce some pesticides from our food.

SPEAKER_04 18:59

No.

SPEAKER_05 19:00

But some of our pesticides are by design, uh we call them systemic pesticides. So they're actually designed to go and be within the fruit or within the the potato?

SPEAKER_01 19:11

Inside it, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 19:12

So you you can't wash those off. You wash all you like, they're still going to be there. The question then has to roll back a little bit to say, well, if we can't get them out, how much of them do we think could be safe? How much uh of this toxic chemical could be safe, could we handle before we had something untoward happen in our body? There are hundreds of pesticides that are registered in Australia, and each one has been assessed and approved individually. Now, of course, we can't test every single organism, so they pick a few. They might pick algae, they might pick a crustacean, they might pick a rat or rabbit or a fish, and they test it and they choose an end point. Now, sometimes those endpoints are quite coarse, like die, dead, alive. That's the end of the study. How many dead, how many alive? Sometimes it can be more nuanced looking at is there toxicity to the neurological system. So the endpoint you choose becomes really important as to the level that you decide at the end of the process, I think this much will be safe. Because the question becomes safe from what? Safe from dying, safe from interruption of neurological signaling, safe from disruption of our hormone levels in our bodies, safe from reduction in sperm motility, but when you assess chemicals one at a time, you do so completely blind to the other chemicals that may be present at exactly the same time or that you have an exposure from from somewhere else. So let's say you have a chemical that's used in treating blueberries, and you eat your blueberry and you get some dimethoate, organophosphate exposure. A low level is deemed to be below the maximum residue limit, it's deemed to be below the acceptable daily intake level, but then you go and eat a potato, and the potato contains a different organophosphate

Ruling Out Disease Pointing To Toxins

SPEAKER_05 21:11

like chlorpyriphos. It might also be below the maximum residue limit in the potato, but it turns out that you're still hungry and you eat something else, and it contains a fungicide. And then you eat something else and it contains a different herbicide. Now that's how real-world exposure is a cocktail. But it assumes you don't get any other exposures. They try and put a little fudge in the system and say, look, we might have got that number wrong about how much could be harmful. So let's just say instead of making one milligram a kilo the safe level, let's make it point one. So we'll just put a bit of a fudge factor in it.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Margin for error, yep.

SPEAKER_05 21:50

A margin for error. And and let's hope that's good enough. Let's hope, let's cross the fingers at this point that that's good enough.

SPEAKER_01 21:57

Until you eat ten blueberries.

SPEAKER_05 21:59

Or a hundred. Or multiple foods. Or live near a farming area where the air that you're breathing contains pesticides.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

I think that's a that's a major one. Because I was reading in one of the articles series that you sent me that a lot of the pesticides they use nowadays, probably not all, but some of them do break down within a few days or weeks. So by the time it gets to us as the consumer and we wash it, much of it might have broken down. But at the moment that they spray it on the crop, anything that's around animals, people is going to be affected quite quickly. So it's it's a hard one. It's like you move to the countryside for the fresh air. And sort of have a more relaxing lifestyle. Yeah, and I think if you move out of the city to get fresh air, then you're potentially going to be closer to the source of these chemicals. It's a bit worrying.

SPEAKER_02 22:51

Well the interesting thing was that that stapling farm that I worked off was neighboring one of the biggest new housing developments in northern Perth. So the more that I think about this, that I only thought about it this morning when we walked in the studio, I actually have experienced this myself. No wonder they didn't want to spray it on that windows plant a certain way, because it just goes straight across the neighbourhood.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

Professor Landos, what government or regulatory agencies did you report this issue to and what ended up being done about it?

SPEAKER_05 23:24

Yes, so there is a requirement when you're an aquaculture licence holder to report unusual mortalities as part of your operating licence. And that goes into the Department of Primary Industries in Queensland. There's also a separate process that the pesticide regulator, they're called the APVMA, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority. The APVMA have what they call an adverse experience event report. So you can go into this adverse reporting program and say, hey, look, I've got these things that have happened and I'm concerned that they're associated with the use of a registered pesticide. And that program has some capacity where it's supposed to investigate. The idea being that if you have an unusual outcome, they want to understand, well, was the chemical used properly according to the label? Is is this something we've seen before? Are we seeing it in several places? I mean if so, maybe we need to review the chemical

Pesticides And Parkinson’s Evidence Grows

SPEAKER_05 24:21

and see if it actually is safe when out there being used. Unfortunately, the process in practice doesn't really work like that, in that it may get to the point of them saying, yes, we might take a look at that and review it. But many of the regulators' reviews are under-resourced, as in they simply don't fund them to get them finished. They kick the can down the road, and the reviews often last for more than twenty years. Meanwhile, the product remains in use.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

I think I read in one of the articles you sent me, which wasn't that old, it was only a couple of years old article, and it was saying that the ABVMA, this regulatory organization, is largely funded by the pesticide industry.

SPEAKER_05 25:02

Yes, that's right. Most of the funding, it's a cost-recovered exercise. So as a statutory regulator, they levy the registrants of the chemicals for funding, and so the largest proportion of their funding is derived from those levies from the chemical industry. Of course, anyone who's paying levies will push back when they are asked to pay more. If you're asked to pay rates, everyone says, Don't put my rates up. Well, it's the same sort of response, of course, from the chemical industry where the regulator would say, look, we need more funding to be able to achieve all of the things that our legislation is asking us to do. But instead they've got a fixed pie and they have to divvy up the pie and say, okay, we'll we'll spend this much on trying to help new chemicals come onto the market by assessing them. So there's a cost to undertaking those assessments for new products to see what's suitable to come onto the market that may be potentially safer, maybe innovative, or in some way other beneficial. Or we can spend our money on doing compliance, so checking that the products are actually what they say they are, or we can spend our money looking at whether or not we've got these adverse event reports covered off and reviews finished. Now in 2023, things got very bad at the APVMA. There were some very disrespectful incidents happening within the staff there where allegedly staff were urinating on their desks. So this led to a significant inquiry with the then agriculture minister Murray Watt. And Murray ordered an inquiry, and the legal firm Clayton Otz in Sydney undertook a review of the regulator to see what was going on there and whether they were operating appropriately within their legislation. And what they found was interesting, they concluded that the regulator was too close to industry. They said that the regulator risked being captured by industry. Now for a regulator whose uppermost priority is regularly stated to be that they will protect human health and they will protect environmental health. In fact, it's in their legislation. There's three things that they must satisfy if they approve a chemical. That's that that chemical is not or would not be an undue hazard to the safety of people exposed to it during its handling or using it or anything that contains its residues. That's just one limb. But they also must be satisfied that it is not or would not be likely to have an effect that's harmful to human beings. Thirdly, it must be is not or would not be likely to have an unintended effect that's harmful to animals, plants, or things, or to the environment. And if they're not satisfied with all three, they should not approve the product.

SPEAKER_03 27:50

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_05 27:51

That's what the legislation says they should be doing. Now I think it is up to the dent of the community to then look at the decisions they've reached. Have the way they arrived at them met with their regulatory criteria? Have they met those criteria? Or have they been bending and flexing? It's worrying when a law firm says, look, they're very close to industry.

SPEAKER_03 28:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 28:17

It's worrying that they might not put public interest first. They might put an industry's interest first or a registrant's interest first, but the legislation doesn't say they should do that. In fact, it expressly says the opposite.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

Yeah. It's one of those instances where something deserves to be publicly funded so we can make sure they're working for us.

SPEAKER_02 28:39

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_05 28:40

Yes, and that that's one opportunity. In other countries, they also recognise that perhaps placing your pesticide regulator under the Department of Agriculture is not the right place for it. Perhaps it should be under the Department of Health. And that's where it is in many other jurisdictions, including Europe and Canada. It sits within the Department of Health. And this helps avoid some potential conflicts. In Australia, unfortunately, we have many layers of conflicts, though, in that political parties are able to accept donations. So we have pesticide lobbyists making donations to our political parties. Now the parties will say, Well, that donation didn't change our decision. It didn't change our view. But if you go to a scientist like a a behavioral psychologist and say, if I give you some money, do you change your behaviour in deference to me? Do you show me a little favoritism? And the answer, of course, is yes. Of course you do.

Systemic Pesticides And Cocktail Exposure

SPEAKER_05 29:41

Because the money has shifted you.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Back to the fish hatchery in Noosa. I understand the Agriculture Minister organized a task force to investigate it.

SPEAKER_05 29:57

Yes, so eventually I did a lot of media at the time expressing my concern that the fish hatchery's interests were not being looked after. And it also interestingly been out to the catchment of the Noosa River. And I met a commercial fisherman there, a lovely fellow called Errol Lindsay, who'd been fishing there for 40 years. I said, Errol, tell me about what you're catching and how you do it. He goes, Well, Matt, I've said the same mesh nets for 40 years in the same locations in this estuary. And he said, What I've seen is that some of the fish, some of them they don't even target, are gone. Snow nosed carfish had disappeared, diamond scale mullet had disappeared from the estuary. I was like, hmm, that's very concerning because that is bigger than the hatchery. There's something wider going on. Now, up in your neck of the woods, uh Martin Cunningham was a commercial fisherman in the Johnston River. And Martin highlighted the fishery was collapsing that he was fishing in. And he was noting the river was becoming full of mud, changes in agriculture had happened in the catchment, and the fish were disappearing. Now this little microcosm of a hatchery was giving us a view into how this could come about. If the animals didn't survive when they were two, four, eight cells as baby larvae, you don't see them die. You don't see the corpses, you don't see the bodies. The fishery just quietly and silently disappears. And this is the real concern that flows from this hatchery case. Interestingly, the lady herself ended up having to move off the property because she couldn't produce fish.

SPEAKER_02 31:33

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_05 31:33

She developed cancer.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_05 31:36

Her dog aborted and had puppies without eye development. And she moved to an alternative site that had no neighboring issues, like the last one, and immediately was able to recommence fish production.

SPEAKER_02 31:50

Oh good.

SPEAKER_05 31:52

It wasn't her techniques that were at fault. It wasn't her methods. It was simply that there was an exposure risk.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

Just minding her own business and so but she was trying at that site for several years. I think it was between 2005, all the way till at least five years later, every every year she was dealing with these issues before she got to move, I suppose.

SPEAKER_05 32:11

So ultimately, in that the property was unviable, could be operated as a fish hatchery because the support had fallen in behind the use of the pesticides.

SPEAKER_01 32:22

A terribly sad story.

SPEAKER_05 32:26

So it's very concerning of a generation where we used to use an old compass at school, and you could put the pin of your little compass in and draw a circle. If we did that in this instance and said, look, how far down the road was there in effect? We actually tested a swimming pool that was about eight hundred metres down the road, and we found the pesticides that were being used on the macadamia farm.

SPEAKER_04 32:48

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_05 32:49

Now, if you do that for every farming operation, just put a little pin in and do a circle of eight hundred metres, you realize that there's a tremendous intersection of use with waterways. A tremendous intersection. It's unavoidable. Now I met Professor John Brodie around a little bit later, and John was testing the rivers running out to the reef. I said, What do you find, John? He said, Well, there are no rivers that are not contaminated with pesticides. None. All of them where we have farming are all contaminated. We now have a pesticide portal that's run by the Queensland government, an excellent resource monitoring pesticides. And you can see that frequently we still end up with pesticides running into the reef lagoon above the levels that we know are dangerous, but they run in anyway. And we're continuing to do this. Now, if we're hoping to have a good outcome out of this, we will be sadly disappointed because this is known harm, not a maybe. This is we're going to kill stuff. We're going to harm the productivity, we're going to collapse the trophic transfer of energy, and we are going to decimate our fisheries. So there's this tremendous need for a better understanding of how water moves through the water cycle and realizing that our farmers are snookered, that the system has in fact ensnared and captured our farmers, and it's not their fault.

APVMA Reporting Funding And Capture Risks

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Yeah, I mean they're getting sick to feed us. So we're all complicit in this. I want to make sure we have time to talk about the solutions. You know, we want to help fix this problem. We don't want to just get angry about it. That's not going to fix it.

SPEAKER_05 34:33

Absolutely. So there are opportunities here where we can see tremendous regenerative capacity from our aquatic ecosystems. So when we take pollutants out of waterways, it is remarkable the speed at which productivity can come back. We've had examples down in my neck of the woods in New South Wales where we've had wetlands where big drains were cut into acid sulfate soil and floodgates were installed, and it led to a tremendous drop in the catches of prawns. Hundreds of tons of prawns just disappeared because the heavy metals were toxifying the food web. Now, eventually we made a rational decision. We went, you know what, that's a silly thing to do. Let's remove the floodgates, reinstate the hydrology, get the natural flow working back into the wetland again. Within a couple of years the food web restored and prawn productivity came back. It just came back.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

Gives you a lot of hope. It's like the ocean with the whales that came back from the brink of extinction. When we just decide to do the right thing, I want everyone out there, all the listeners, to know that there is hope we can come back from this. But we need to figure out what the right thing is to do and do it.

SPEAKER_05 35:46

That's right. So there's a number of things that are happening. Plenty of innovators, Australian farmers are unbelievably innovative. And innovators are already working out ways where instead of framing the question of how do I create the maximum yield from my paddock, from my hectare of land, how do I get the maximum amount of cane or wheat? That's one question. If you frame your question like that, there's a real risk that you'll do something with it in your paddock that you didn't intend but it caused an offsite impact. So while you were busy increasing the yield per hectare, you didn't realise that the water running off that property, both into the groundwater and off into surface water, was causing a collapse in productivity in the fishery. So we got more wheat, but less fish. Is that a win? We got more wheat, but we got less health or disease, lower IQ, lowered fertility, increased cancer. Now, what you can do, and this is the real opportunity, is to do what we call true cost accounting. This is where you bring in these externalities that are unintended. No one planned to give anyone cancer. But we have to acknowledge that the health data is real. Cancer rates are rising. In Australia, we are leading the world in cancer. We have the highest rate of cancer on the planet. We also have the fastest increasing rate of pesticide use on the planet.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

Yeah, and I understand there are at least 70 pesticides used in Australia which are already banned in other countries like in the EU and the USA. So we're just out there spraying it all over the place.

SPEAKER_02 37:26

And what are we doing down here? Tucked down the bottom of the planet. Let's get our act together. Come on.

SPEAKER_05 37:30

So we need to work out ways to help support transition for farmers. It's not as simple as just removing the chemicals. That's not a complete solution because the farming systems that have evolved around those chemicals have made them essential in that farming system. So now we're talking about a system change. This is a bigger leap. This is a risk. It's a financial risk for a farmer to take. Part of why farmers are ensnared is that they do make low risk decisions. They're conservative. That's not a mistake on the part of a farmer to be conservative. They've got to remain viable. They've got to generate enough profit to maintain their property. Now, if they take a big risk and it doesn't come off, what happens? We lose our farmer. Also, causing excessive nutrient into our waterways, causing more harm. So I think the idea is that all this pollution it goes away. But it doesn't actually go away.

SPEAKER_04 38:43

No.

SPEAKER_05 38:43

So when it goes off the farm or goes off as a residue in the food, a colleague of mine says, you know where it turns up? It turns up in your health record.

SPEAKER_03 38:51

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 38:51

That's the rhetoric that they've been wanting us to believe. Oh, don't worry about the dude in the hazmat suit that can't breathe while he's spraying all his stuff all over your fruit and veg. By the time it gets

Fisheries Collapse Hope And True Cost Fixes

SPEAKER_02 39:01

you, you'll be alright. As long as your tomatoes are like a football. Your veggies are big, they're all nice and colourful, but in actual fact it's just rubbish.

SPEAKER_05 39:09

So we can make other choices as consumers here. So we have some power. You know, we can be satisfied with slightly imperfect fruit. We can be satisfied that in fact an aphid on your lettuce is going to do you no harm.

SPEAKER_02 39:23

Yeah, he's just munching away.

SPEAKER_05 39:24

But when you decide that you want nil aphids, that zero is the right number, you inadvertently incentivize a system that can harm you.

SPEAKER_01 39:35

Yeah. Well, we could do a whole other episode on organic farming. We were all going to get our backyard veggie patches started, the whole principle of like you know, encouraging the good insects because they eat the bad insects, and encouraging different plants because this plant discourages the bad plants, and they all live together and help each other out. There are so many alternatives to just purely just relying on chemicals, but we've become really, really dependent on them. So it's going to take a bit of work to dig ourselves out of this hole that we've dug for our society of how we run our food production systems, I guess.

SPEAKER_05 40:11

Yes, food and fibre. So we need this transition for farmers that we can help with, as consumers, we can help with by educating our political representatives to say, look, it's not okay that Parkinson's is rising. We we want root cause analysis done and we want true cost accounting done. We want that to be seen as an investment. So if we're spending more and more money on health care, why couldn't we spend more and more money on transitioning away from the thing that's generating the cost?

SPEAKER_01 40:41

Yeah, which is kind of what happened, like just for an example, with cigarettes, it got to the point where the the medical cost from people all getting sick and getting lung cancer just became so high that they were like, nope, we've got to nip this at the root cause, and they put a lot more regulations on cigarettes in Australia and taxes and things like that, which um worked. We have way lower rates of cigarette smokers in Australia now because of all the regulations that they put on them.

SPEAKER_02 41:06

You very rarely see anyone smoking anymore. And when you do, you're just like, what is that smell?

SPEAKER_05 41:10

Yes, and so we must ensure that our regulations work. So this is another area that's in sharp focus now. There's a a Senate inquiry happening on parakeat, a herbicide, and how the APVM may review that at the moment. People might think about putting a submission into that about their concerns about parake and Parkinson's. Our regulator needs to work properly. They need to use science, real science, as the method for which they can consider and assess which of these compounds we are able to use safely and which we are not, because that is a central role of functioning regulator to help us give ourselves a better chance of living in a sustainable way.

SPEAKER_01 41:50

Yeah. Alright, well, we've only got a couple of minutes left, and as I flagged, I knew it would be, this is a whole kettle of fish, a kettle of very thick two-headed fish. Yeah. And um that's why I was thinking, yep, it'll be great to get you back on the show at a later date because we haven't even touched on all the other types of toxic chemicals. We've only scratched the surface. So just to finish off, do you have any last comments or any recommendations of resources where people can find out more?

SPEAKER_05 42:15

Yes, look, I've written up a few case studies about pollution and fisheries with a group called the International Pollution Elimination Network, or IPen. Their website is www.ipen.org. And if you look after the fishery pollution

What Listeners Can Do Next

SPEAKER_05 42:31

case studies, you'll find them there. And they give you a synthesis of the science. So if you don't think this is an opinion, Pete, I don't want people to think this is just Matt running his mouth off.

SPEAKER_01 42:41

Sadly, that's all we have time for today. Dr. Matt Landor, quite director of the C53's veteran service, and I don't get a professor at the University of Greenland School of Environment. Thanks for your making work, and thanks for joining us somewhere on the read today.