An expert says opportunities to expand agricultural production in northern Australia have been dramatically overstated.

"It's a very fierce climate, ask any farmer if they'd like to go farm somewhere with a guaranteed drought every year?'" said Charles Darwin University Professor Andrew Campbell.

"Evaporation is markedly greater than rainfall and has water scarcity, and there are many novel pests and diseases, inputs costs are much higher, labour is more difficult to attract, infrastructure is much poorer and supply chains are much more vulnerable."

Speaking at the Australian Academy of Technological Science and Engineering (ATSE) conference, he said food production is only likely to increase by around 5 per cent in northern Australia.

He highlighted as a rare exception, the mango industry outside Darwin.

Built by Vietnamese immigrants with links to the market traders in Sydney and Melbourne, which has become a $100 million industry.

Indigenous wild rices on the flood plains have genetic diversity that could be cross bred with mainstream rices, to improve resilience in a changing climate.

Solar opportunities

Investment banker David Williams of Kidder Williams told the conference he was highly critical of big scale failures in the Ord Irrigation scheme, with its long history of crops destroyed by pests and a vicious climate.

With a team of colleagues, Professor Campbell proposed a large scale solar farm in the Northern Territory that could be used to pump water to flow through turbines to generate electricity.

"North-western Australia enjoys much more sun than Java, much more solar energy per square metre in a year and it's not as cloudy.

"We've mapped a scheme to convert one cattle station to 250 square kilometres of panels, you could use that to pump water out of Lake Argyle to a big turkey nest dam, and have that flow down hill overnight in a pumped-hydro scheme.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 11 minutes 16 seconds 11 m Development of agriculture in northern Australia as a food bowl is less feasible than renewable energy or tourism, says Professor Andrew Campbell of Charles Darwin University ( Sarina Locke ) Download 5.2 MB

"You could produce power 24/7 and through a high voltage cable, like that between Victoria and Tasmania, between Norway and the Netherlands and one proposed from Iceland to Scotland, you could run that through all the cities of Asia from Dili to Denpasar, Jakarta and Singapore."

He quoted costing worked out by Professor Andrew Blakers at the Australian National University, who found in Jakarta, residents would pay eight cents per kilowatt hour, not much more than they currently spend; six cents per kilowatt hour from coal fired power.

The overall cost is estimated at $850 billion, which is less than the trillion dollars Indonesia plans to spend on power generation over the next 15 years.

The idea sounds far fetched, expensive and technically difficult and Professor Campbell said the main difficulties lie in raising the capital, but it is technically feasible.

What's more, the Indonesian energy planners had already thought of it 20 years ago and identified it as the most sustainable long term power supply.

Tourism and education

Already popular as a destination, the Northern Territory has a lot more potential.

"The area from Broome around to Cairns, it's the world's largest region of unregulated rivers, there's only one dam, Lake Argyle," said Professor Campbell.

"In our recent survey of the Daly River, we found more than 100 fish species without a single alien fish, that's unique."

He said the story needs to get the message right for the different markets; adventure tourism, grey nomads and the cruise ship visitors.

But it will require a lot of investment, and linkages between the small scale tourism operations.

Darwin as a tropical city is attractive to Asian students, and expertise in tropical medicine is highly marketable.

Professor Campbell said boosting investment in tourism, education, defence, and renewable energy have greater scope to ride the boom bust cycles than agriculture.