The Northern Territory and South Australia are teaming up on a native bush product industry that will trademark bushfoods and create jobs for indigenous people, the NT's chief minister says.
Adam Giles met with SA Premier Jay Weatherill in Adelaide on Wednesday to discuss how the two jurisdictions can work more closely together.
Mr Giles says he'll head up a task force based in central Australia that will identify native bush products, find out what they could be used for and protect their intellectual property rights in an effort to create a sustainable economy for indigenous people.
A lot of bush food had been eaten or utilised for many thousands of years, but never protected or properly researched, he told reporters on Thursday.
"It's a real risk that the IP of those species could be picked up and taken overseas and, for want of a better term, stolen ... We should identify those products and copyright their IP so they can't be stolen."
He said the rights to native plants and their uses should be owned by the indigenous people who have traditionally used them.
"There would be more than a thousand different products in the bush of Australia that can certainly be used as bush foods, bush garnishes or otherwise," Mr Giles said.
"We know pharmaceutical companies have used many of these products for many a long year, and the credit hasn't always been provided to Australia or to those owners."
He pointed to the example of the macadamia nut, which despite being an Australian native, is known better as a foreign product.
