Researchers

DR JOHN MULLEN Dr John Mullen

For many years, Institute adjunct professor Dr John Mullen, has been collecting information of how much public funding has been spent on agricultural research.


The end result is a unique and comprehensive set of figures that date back to 1953 and which show a stagnation in public funding over the last couple of decades. An economist, John, has also been keeping a close eye on Australia’s agricultural productivity over that period. He says that now the lag time is kicking in, Australia is starting to pay the price in terms of declining productivity.
It is something that concerns him greatly and is something he is happy to speak publicly on.  “What’s happening in Australia and there is evidence of this globally is that agricultural productivity is slowing down and this is a real worry because we’ve got things like climate change occurring and we’ve got three billion more people to feed in the next 30 years,” says John. “In Australia we know we’ve had a run of bad seasons and that explains some of the decline in productivity but the research I have done with ABARE since I’ve been with CSU suggests that some of this slow down can only be explained by this stagnation in public investment in agricultural research and development that’s been happening over the last couple of decades. The lags in research are really long, 30 odd years, so for a long time we never saw any evidence in terms of productivity figures of the impact of this decline in R & D funding. It’s only now starting to bite and kick in.”

John,60, is a former principal research scientist and research leader in economics research with the NSW Department of Primary Industries. He has extensive experience in regional Australia and has studied and worked on projects overseas. John grew up in Orange in NSW’s central west and went to boarding school at St Joseph’s College at Hunter’s Hill in Sydney. One of the first in the Wyndham Scheme, John got a traineeship in 1968 with the NSW Department of Agriculture to study agricultural economics at the University of New England. “And I’ve never been successful at another job interview,” laughs John who stayed with the Department in its various forms until he took a voluntary redundancy in March, 2009.

In 1972 he started at the Wollongbar Research Station between Lismore and Ballina and was transferred at the end of the year to the Department’s district office at Orange. In 1978 (with his wife and new baby daughter) he spent six months at UNE in Armidale for the residency requirement of his Masters which he completed in 1980. His Masters was on the consumption behaviour of farm families, looking at how farm families altered their household spending in response to fluctuating incomes. John, who got a research assistantship from Texas A & M University in the U.S., took study leave from 1982 to 1985 to do his PhD on how beef producers, processors and consumers shared in the benefits of new beef processing technology. By this time he and his wife had three young children. In 1991 they spent 12 months (funded by the Australian Meat Research Committee, the Australian Wool Corporation and the Department)at North Carolina State University where he wrote papers on the willingness of consumers to pay for the attributes of lamb.“By then we had four children but came back with five,” says John.

On his return, after years as the regional economist for the Central West Region, John switched to a research scientist classification within the NSW Department of Primary Industries. “For all this time an interest of mine was and still is the impact of agricultural research on productivity in agriculture and science policy,” says John.  In 2001, he went to the University of California, Davis for nine months as a visiting scholar where he evaluated the impact of research by the UC system since 1950 into integrated pest management.  John, who was made a distinguished fellow of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society last year, was president of that society in 2006 and was the co-editor of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics from 2002 to 2004. He has been an adjunct professor of the University for a number of years, and, while he still lives at Orange, has an office on the Bathurst campus. Since he has retired he has been involved in a number of small research projects for the Department of Primary Industries in Victoria, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). The ACIAR projects have involved assessments of the impact of agricultural research funded by ACIAR in the Philippines and China. “Normally we evaluate technology but what we did in China was one of the first evaluations of policy research if you like,” says John who initially did the evaluation in 2003, with a second evaluation last year.

John, in keeping with his core research interest, is involved in an upcoming submission by ABARE and Vic. DPI on the role of Government and how R & D should be funded, to the Productivity Commission. “It is also a science policy issue,” says John finds himself being invited to give papers and talks on the topic. This year he has presented a paper at the Australian Agriculture Institute of Science and Technology Conference held in Canberra in March and gave the Dean’s lecture at the Melbourne School of Land and the Environment on “Maintaining support for agricultural research and development” on June 2. In November he will go to New Zealand for the Agronomy Society Conference to present on the topic.

During the 90s John assembled a database on R & D spending by CSIRO, State departments and universities which went back to 1953. It was a unique data set to which John has added data now being collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. “I’m the keeper of the database if you like, on R & D spending on agricultural research in Australia,” says John. “I can see what the trends are and the data I have allows you to do econometric work…when you have long lags you need a long data set. Mine is the only econometric study between the relationship between productivity growth and R & D in Australia.” The study is now being revised in preparation for the submission to the Productivity Commission. “All the evidence is suggesting that investment in R & D is a good investment,” says John. “ You can expect a return of 15 to 40% return on public funds invested in R & D.” At a more personal level, John says for the future, he would like to play more golf. He also plans on doing the Camino de Santiago trail (from Pau in France to Santiago) for the second time next year. “But while people keep ringing me up I’m happy to work on the things I’m interested in,” says John. “When the phone stops ringing I’ll just play more golf I suppose.”

 

Article appeared in Connections#22  August 2010