Food security critical to national security, Global Food Forum warns

For successive generations of Australians, the economic success and growth of the national economy over the past three decades has been the gift that keeps on giving.

Skyrocketing resources and agricultural prices, backed by our knowledge-based “services” economy and the robust, voracious appetite for Australian real estate, have seen an explosion in the individual or per capita wealth of Australians, or at least that is what was thought and what we were told.

Driven in large part by the voracious demand of Beijing and developing economies throughout the Indo-Pacific, Australia’s role as the breadbasket of Asia seemed assured, as did the security of the nation’s agricultural industry.

However, where the “rules-based” international trade order once was recognised as the “rule of the road“, the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly and decisively shattered belief in the system, with the nation’s agricultural industry bearing the brunt of China’s wrath.

While trade relations have now normalised to a degree, Australia’s farmers and agricultural industry have bounced back, but the mask has slipped, giving rise to an era of multipolarity and great power competition.

This era of competition and broader global challenges is serving to have a dramatic impact on the nation’s agricultural industry, with calls for greater emphasis on national food security, with The Australian spearheading the charge.

A weak supply chain and risk mitigation

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Despite the best efforts and rhetoric of successive governments since the COVID-19 pandemic and even arguably before that, it has become abundantly clear that the nation’s supply chains are immensely vulnerable.

Highlighting this, Independent Food Distributors Australia CEO Richard Forbes stressed the importance of developing a national food security plan to form part of a broader holistic approach to national security.

Forbes said: “We have a weak supply chain, make no bones about it, and when you have a weak supply chain that’s vulnerable, you have vulnerable food businesses, and you have a vulnerable community.

“We’ve got an unprecedented number of threats in this country, and I and the Food Supply Chain Alliance do not believe it is being tackled by government at all.”

Citing specific examples of constrained supply chains as a result of the ongoing war in Ukraine, Forbes warned policymakers of the dangers associated with formulating policy in a bubble and not keeping track of broader global trends and accounting for their domestic implications.

“We should have known that there would have been a shortage in (fuel additive) AdBlue in 2021 because it was short in Europe three months before we picked it up. We need to plan for what to do if something like that comes to pass,” Forbes said.

Going further, Forbes stressed the importance of appropriate risk management in national policy planning, saying: “Risk mitigation is thinking about how we protect food businesses, the community and how we protect the country.”

A critical pillar of national security

With all of the government emphasis on building national security and resilience as a result of the growing international multipolarity and deterioration of the post-Second World War order, food security seems to have been a little overlooked.

Addressing this major challenge becomes of critical importance, with Andrew Henderson, a food security advocate and principle of Agsecure, an agriculture-focused advisory service, saying: “We export about 70 per cent of the food we produce, but that productive capacity is entirely reliant on fertiliser imports, liquid fuel imports, labour, much of which is imported, imported crop protection products, packaging and things that support our own manufacturing capability.”

Henderson’s comments feed into the Commonwealth’s Made in Australia policy designed to reignite the fires of manufacturing and industrialisation in the country.

For Henderson, this becomes a matter of seizing the opportunity presented by the global and regional reordering of power, with an opportunity to enhance and strengthen this critical pillar of national security.

“The government has created an unprecedented intervention into market-based activities, but it needs to be repurposed to address our critical vulnerabilities. It is the ideal vehicle. The good thing about the act is they’ve left the door open to other interventions,” Henderson said.

One can only imagine the public outcry and civil unrest that would become the new norm in the aftermath of food shortages and rationing should it be required as a result of another pandemic, significant domestic or international supply shocks or conflict in the region.

Accordingly, getting on the front foot and directly engaging with the agricultural industry and elements of the broader supply chain will require novel thinking, ambition and commitment over the long term.

Final thoughts

Australians are going to be asked to accept a number of uncomfortable realities in the coming years. First and foremost, we will have to accept that while the world is increasingly becoming “multipolar”, the Indo-Pacific, in particular, is rapidly becoming the most hotly contested region in the world.

This has been underpinned by the emerging economic, political, and strategic might of powers like China, India, Pakistan, Thailand, and Vietnam, and the established and re-emerging capability of both South Korea and Japan, in particular, are serving to create a hotbed of competition on our doorstep.

Second, both the Australian public and our policymakers will have to accept that without a period of considered effort, investment and reform, or as I like to colloquially refer to it, our rocky montage moment, current and future generations of Australians will be increasingly impoverished, living in a nation pushed around by the region’s now rising powers.

Recognising this array of challenges and opportunities, both the Australian public and its policymakers need to look beyond the myopic lens of short-termism that has traditionally dominated our diplomatic, strategic, and economic policy making since Federation.

Ultimately, we need to see Australia begin to play the long game to fully capitalise on the opportunities transforming the Indo-Pacific.

The most important question now becomes, when will we see a more detailed analysis and response to the challenges and opportunities facing Australia, and when will we see both a narrative and strategy that better helps industry and the Australian public understand the challenges faced and opportunities we have presented before us?

As events continue to unfold throughout the region and China continues to throw its economic, political, and strategic weight around, can Australia afford to remain a secondary power, or does it need to embrace a larger, more independent role in an era of increasing great power competition?