The Board and Participants of the CRC for National Plant Biosecurity have agreed to support the development of a re-bid proposal based on a plant biosecurity CRC.
As a first step the Board have formed a taskforce to assist them in developing the proposal. The taskforce consist of participant representatives (one each representing the grain industry/corporate (Dr Jody Higgins), national agencies (Dr Andy Sheppard), states (Dr Martin Barlass), horticulture industry (Mr Brad Wells), the regulatory agencies (Dr Shashi Sharma) and higher education sectors (Prof Giles Hardy), plus the Chairman and myself of the CRCNPB.

To assist the Board and Taskforce, I will use the blog over the coming months to raise issues and seek your feedback. It is my hope that this will assist in achieving a greater level of ownership among the full plant biosecurity community.

The key objectives of the Taskforce and Board over the next month are to identify the scope of the rebid and the titling of the re-bid. It is clear from the CRC Guidelines that the re-bid must be driven by end-users with the challenges clearly articulated.

Our current CRC has a very broad scope and some level of refinement is advisable as we develop a re-bid. The first step in refining the scope is a re-defining of the Programs to ensure they clearly address the challenges identified by end-users. In line with the CRC Guidelines we need to identify new research that has not been undertaken as part of the current CRC and this should represent at least 50% of the total research.

I seek your input as to how the scope could be re-defined and ideas for new research that would fit within this scope.

Throughout the current life of the CRCNPB it has often been difficult to attain full understanding of the term biosecurity by our various participants. The very close linkage between biosecurity and trade/market access is often not identified with many simply seeing the term biosecurity as relating to quarantine at the border and terrorism.

Trade/market access are the key focuses of our industry participants. It will be important that the re-bid clearly illustrates that one of the drivers for biosecurity is maintaining and allowing trade through maintenance of market access as well as food security and industry sustainability.

Your thoughts on re-titling of the CRC for the re-bid or a new tag-line to clearly articulate our purpose are sought.