A REVIEW OF CONTINGENCY PLANNING AND THE EMERGENCY RESPONSE TO THE INCURSION OF SUGARCANE SMUT IN QUEENSLAND

SUGARCANE smut disease was first found in eastern Australia near Childers in June 2006. This triggered a large-scale emergency response following PLANTPLAN and was the first activation of the Government and Plant Industry Cost Sharing Deed in Respect of Emergency Plant Pest Responses Deed (EPP Deed). This paper reports industry feedback on the response and recommendations to improve the sugar industry’s preparedness for incursions of serious pests in the future. Recommendations were: the industry needs to review the Sugar Industry Biosecurity Plan following the experience with smut; industry people need training in what PLANTPLAN entails; contingency plans and associated operational procedures for each pest need to be tested to determine what is missing or impractical; a structured communications plan should be part of each contingency plan; the communication plan must have a model for stakeholder involvement agreed to by the industry; contingency plans require a strategy for dealing with privacy issues; contingency plans should have protocols for movement of machinery and equipment that are practical and consistent with the biology of the pest; protocols must consider harvest and transport arrangements; contingency plans should detail the level and methods of surveillance recommended for various stages of the incursion and include diagnostic procedures; the sugar industry needs to identify and develop contingency plans for the major exotic threats and provide training for industry people in diagnosis; cost sharing under the EPP Deed should be staged with a guaranteed amount to cover the initial stages of an incursion for defined pests to allow long-term response plans to be based on better information about the incursion; test commercial cultivars for resistance to identified major threats where the appropriate control measure is resistant cultivars and make quantities of the most productive cultivars with resistance available to all districts.