National Agriculture Traceability Regulatory Technology Research and Insights Grant

The Australian Government has committed $68.4 million for Australia’s agricultural traceability systems to support forward looking innovative ideas creating new avenues for value adding, opportunities to gain access to new markets, and enhance the overall economic benefits to industry through increasing efficiency in meeting compliance obligations.

Traceability is the ability to follow the movement of a product through stages of production, processing and distribution (ISO 2007). In Australia, traceability is used to meet regulatory requirements, such as those for biosecurity (pest and disease control) and food safety, and to demonstrate provenance of agricultural products for export markets. Due to the breadth of agricultural industries and the range of players and requirements involved, traceability systems are a complex mixture of government requirements and industry led accreditations.

This grant program will provide opportunities for successful applicants to make further improvements to agricultural traceability consistent with the objectives of the consultation draft Strategy, and contribute to the development of innovative and practicable proposals to increase the use of RegTech along agricultural supply chains. Research and insights will demonstrate how to leverage RegTech to enhance agricultural traceability reforms, and support growth of the agricultural sector.

Initiatives developed under this grant program will make the case to provide digital solutions for industry as they uplift and convert current manual regulatory processes. They will also help refine digitisation and automation of data recording, and reduce the time and dollar costs of administration and compliance.

Projects are sought that strengthen partnerships across industry, scientific organisations; cooperative research centres; state, territory or local governments; corporate Commonwealth entities; universities; or, public and private research organisations to better ensure any solutions proposed will have clear and ongoing benefits for Australian agriculture.

This also aligns with assessment criterion listed under section 6. Increased collaboration across sectors and stakeholder groups on solutions will support industry and government in growing the agricultural sector and transforming it to be a more modern, digitised industry, allowing for increased value-adding and increased compliance efficiencies.