CAIRNS should look at growing rice instead of sugar cane to become a world market leader to help feed Asia and to save the Great Barrier Reef.

The keynote speaker at the Mayor’s Kingsford’s lunch yesterday, Prof Ian Lowe, said the Far North must make sustainable development adaptations to meet challenges such as peak oil, due between 2010-2012, and climate change.

The emeritus professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University said rice plantations could help future Far Northerners.

"The world market for sugar has been increasingly problematic and it has become harder and harder for people to earn a living growing cane in Australia," he said.

"You are competing with people who have third world economies and very much lower labour costs and we are a fair way away from world markets.

"All of the indicators of food per person globally have peaked and are declining, so food is going to be increasingly valuable and we live very near a region where half of the world’s population live and for whom rice is the staple crop.

"At the moment we are trying to grow rice in the arid zone in southern Australia and doing dreadful damage to the river systems in the process.

"At the moment growing sugar in the Far North is damaging the Reef because of the run-off of nutrients and sediment because cane fields don’t try to keep the water there."

A spokesman from the Cairns Historical Society told The Weekend Post that in the past three rice mills operated in Cairns while Mareeba and Port Douglas also attempted to have productions before they closed down the mills.

Prof Lowe, who is also the president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the Far North’s attractive lifestyle could also attract portable knowledge industries, such as distance education and web design, because they could be practised anywhere.

He said the region could become more self-sufficient in energy use by exploring bio diesel and using ethanol as a local transport fuel.

He said the Far North got most of its supplies from coal burnt near Gladstone or refineries in south Queensland.

But he said he believed the Far North could become the first sustainable region through its Tropical North Queensland Sustainable Region Committee if local, state and federal members and bodies drove the initiative locally.

"The point I made today is that the north of Queensland is one of a few places in Australia that could in principle be self sufficient in everything that is important," he said.

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