Food security is a growing national resilience issue
Food sovereignty: the case for growing Australia's resilience
Australia produces more food than it eats. On paper, that has long been enough to call ourselves food secure. But food security is about more than production or availability. It depends on the end-to-end supply chain, from farms to supermarket shelves. Rapid and unpredictable shifts in markets and the environment, including international conflict, biosecurity threats and climate change, are placing significant pressure on that system.
In practice, the question that matters now is whether Australians can continue to afford the food they want, whether farmers and other businesses in the value chain can continue producing it, and what happens when the systems behind it come under pressure.
These questions are no longer hypothetical. Home-brand milk has already risen by up to 12 per cent this year, a flow-on from higher diesel and fertiliser costs moving through the dairy supply chain. Even packaging is exposed, with plastic milk bottles tied to the same volatile markets and disruptions affecting the supply of raw and finished plastic products.
The recent detection of H5N1 avian influenza on Australian shores is another stark reminder of how quickly a biosecurity threat can spread across our country, potentially disrupting production, reducing supply, driving up prices, and triggering trade restrictions that ripple well beyond the farms affected.
Climate change is adding a third layer of pressure and, as we have seen in Europe during their summer, the impacts are building quickly. Heatwaves are increasingly striking crops during their most sensitive growth stages, water allocations are tightening in key growing regions, and farmers are finding that growing seasons are becoming harder to predict year on year. Each of those shifts makes yields, and the cost of producing them, less certain.
What this reflects is a food system under pressure that depends on imported fuel, imported fertiliser and other inputs, in an environment where growing conditions are becoming less stable. The current crisis in the Middle East has exposed the impact on fuel supply and prices to Australians, but what they will increasingly start to see is changes to the type and amount of food they can afford to buy.
Without change, farmers and consumers will have to start making difficult choices.
What sovereignty actually means
Improving Australian food security does not mean growing everything ourselves or closing off exports. It means building food sovereignty: the capability to keep producing, processing and moving food and fibre when the inputs we have traditionally relied on from overseas become expensive, unreliable or unavailable. The less exposed our food system is to a shipping route, a fertiliser cargo or a diesel price on the other side of the world, the more control Australians keep over what their groceries cost.
AFII isn't alone in making this case. In a joint submission to the National Food Security Strategy, AFII, Cellular Agriculture Australia and the ANU National Security College argued that food security is national security, and that proactive investment in sovereign agricultural production, including the inputs Australian farms depend on, is essential to keeping the country food secure into the future.
The cost of doing nothing
Left unaddressed, the economic cost hits farmers and shoppers. When diesel, fertiliser and freight costs climb faster than farm gate prices, or when consumers stop buying because prices get too high, growing a crop or running a herd can stop making business sense. Farmers do not keep producing at a loss. They adjust what they grow, scale back or leave paddocks idle, and every one of those decisions reduces the food and fibre moving through the system.
Those business decisions show up on the other end of the supply chain as higher prices and fewer choices at the checkout, not just what households can afford to buy, but how much of it they can put in the trolley. We have seen this before, with egg shortages during the last bird flu outbreak and the increase in dairy and meat products following the start of the Middle East crisis in February. Left to compound, rising costs and shrinking domestic production reinforce each other: less local supply pushes Australia further toward imported alternatives, which are themselves exposed to the same fuel, fertiliser and shipping pressures, driving up cost-of-living pressures.
Building resilience into the system
This is the work AFII is driving at the ANU, creating nationally important conversations that connect government, researchers and industry working on Australia's food system. No single project or discipline can fix the challenges in food sovereignty on its own. It takes crop science, energy research, waste innovation and biosecurity working together, each strengthening a different point in the system, so that Australian-made food and fibre remain affordable and available regardless of what's happening overseas.
Some of the research at ANU starts with the crops that we are producing. The C4 Rice project is redesigning rice photosynthesis, lifting yields by around 30 per cent in field trials while improving drought and heat tolerance. New sensing technology is helping farmers catch nutrient deficiencies in canola before they impact production, and remote sensing research is helping growers lift productivity and climate resilience.
Other research underway looks specifically at other input costs. Diesel, fertiliser and energy make up a large share of the cost of growing and moving food. Agrivoltaics research is exploring how farms can produce food and renewable energy on the same land, while work on turning wastewater into fertiliser is cutting reliance on imported fertiliser inputs.
And some of it is about catching problems before they spread. Biosecurity and One Health research is examining how human, animal, plant and environmental health intersect, so that threats like H5N1 are detected and managed before they disrupt supply and push up prices.
A national conversation worth having
None of this reflects a shortage of food. It reflects a food system under pressure that depends on imported fuel, imported fertiliser and other inputs, in an environment where growing conditions are becoming less stable. The current crisis in the Middle East has exposed the impact of fuel supply and prices on Australians, but what they will increasingly start to see is changes to the type and amount of food they can afford to buy.
Creating national sovereignty isn't about warning that Australia will run out of food. It's about what it takes to keep Australian-grown food and fibre within reach, made here, for the people who rely on it.
AFII will continue to share updates on research from across the ANU, helping connect expertise, inform and convene public conversations, and build the knowledge and capability needed to address Australia's food security and resilience challenges. Follow us to stay informed about the latest research highlights, insights, and opportunities to engage.
