‘We’re in trouble’: Australia risks food insecurity, expert warns

By the time it reaches your bowl, your Quaker Oats may have completed an international round-trip. The grain might be grown in Australia, but much of it is processed in the US before we import it back as the final product.

The process leans on global supply chains that have recently been pushed to the brink by climate-fuelled weather disasters, COVID-19, and Russia’s war on Ukraine. However, local experts are now warning the domestic food manufacturing and processing industry must be urgently developed to ensure Australians have access to a steady supply of food, or risk shortages and more frequent price rises.

Bare supermarket shelves will become a more common sight if governments don’t act to prevent food insecurity caused by climate change and supply chain problems, a recent report found.Credit:James Brickwood

“If there’s instability like there is now where supply chains are impacted, we then can’t bring in the food. Or if we do bring it in, it’s at a price that the consumer can’t afford,” La Trobe Institute for Agriculture and Food’s Professor Antony Bacic said.

“We can’t always rely on importing products and these supply chains have shown that we do need to have capacity ourselves to have a degree of independence.”

With 70 per cent of agriculture shipped abroad, Australia has substantial credentials as an exporter of food – but predominantly in its rawest form, as primary products such as wheat or meat. By contrast, our food manufacturing and processing sector – which makes what’s called “value-added” food – has remained underdeveloped.

“I think it’s been a failure of government policy to, in fact, set up a competitive internal environment that allows our industries to flourish here,” Bacic said.

“If we want to move away from being a commodity producer, where in fact we’re going to be outcompeted by a lot of other countries, we need to start to develop highly skilled work opportunities in Australia.”

Only about five days’ worth of perishable food exists in the supply chain at any given time, according to a recent report from the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group. It’s a statistic Bacic says he found confronting and frightening.

“If we want to have diversity of food supplies, then I think we do have to have a capacity to produce it here,” he said.

Even the future of Australia’s mighty $49 billion agricultural sector is looking shaky. Thanks to climate change, production of major export commodities such as wheat, beef, dairy and sugar will fall as much as 19 per cent by 2050, the Climate Group’s report found.

La Trobe Institute of Agriculture and Food and university professor Antony Bacic.

To address food insecurity, La Trobe University and CSIRO have joined forces to propose the Australian Food Innovation Centre (AFIC), which would function as a research, development and innovation lab to help industry devise improved agricultural crops that are high-yield, disease-resistant and more water-efficient.

As an example of the kind of work AFIC would do, La Trobe Institute for Agriculture and Food has worked with global beverage giant PepsiCo to create a new oat “genome blueprint” that contains 2000 newly discovered genes made free to oat breeders and biotechnologists that will assist in breeding drought- and heat-resistant oat crops to reduce supply instability.

So far, the Victorian government has committed $1.5 million to AFIC, but this is a fraction of the $300 million to $400 million Bacic says is needed from state and federal governments to set it up. He estimates the centre would add $100 million a year to Australia’s food exports and create up to 30 new food manufacturing facilities in its first decade.

“It’s such a critically important thing for Australia because without food, we’re in trouble,” Bacic said.

Bacic is the latest voice to join a growing chorus of business leaders and industry heavyweights calling for more investment in local food production. Agribusiness Elders chief Mark Allison says it could be a $300 billion opportunity.

A commitment to “make more things here in Australia” has been a key pledge in Anthony Albanese’s pitch to win government.

Manufacturing jobs in the 1960s made up 25 per cent of the workforce; now that’s about 6 per cent. A 2020 report by think tank Australia Institute pointed out that the COVID crisis made the “strategic importance” of local manufacturing “more obvious”.

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