To exist we need at least three things: food, water and shelter. Obviously, inhabitants of island states must either source their sustenance locally or import it by air or sea. Australia does both.
COVID-19 has put a spotlight on the extent to which Australia relies on others to provide the things we consider essential but tend to take for granted. Australia is the driest inhabited continent. Our high-quality soil resources are relatively few. We’re dependent on others for 83 per cent of our crude oil and, as our Bass Strait reserves decline further, our dependency is on the rise. Without oil, we can’t manufacture petrol or diesel for our farm machinery, or for anything else for that matter.
We constantly boast that we produce enough food to feed around 75 million people. This is a great thing but does our current capacity to produce much more food than we consume guarantee us food security? The answer could be ‘yes’. But are we sure?
There are at least four variables capable of challenging our food security: a hotter and drier climate, the vulnerabilities of our biosecurity defences, import dependency for food-production inputs, and an increasingly uncertain geopolitical environment.
Australia’s farm productivity has been flatlining for a decade. Increased food production has challenged the limits of our natural resources. In short, for too many years our farming methods and our quest for greater production volumes have affected the health of our soils, their fertility and their ability to hold water. Now, climatic conditions threaten to further apply a brake on production.
Last year, we imported around $20 billion worth of food, and imports are growing. Most Australians would be shocked to learn that up to 95 per cent of pork sold in supermarkets is imported, along with 70 per cent of our seafood, and around 25 per cent of our dairy products.
Possibly the biggest wake-up call of all is the extent to which we now rely on the importation – mainly from China – of the crop-protection products our farmers need to maintain product volume. If the supply of those chemicals were cut off, our production yields would collapse.
Yet, with Australian manufacturer Nufarm’s decision to exit the Australian market due to the inability to compete with China, we’re about to lose our capacity to locally produce the key active ingredients needed to manufacture the products our farmers rely upon.
Australia’s greatest future unknown is the shape and character of our region. Will the US stay so engaged? Will China’s rise continue at pace, and how will it use its military and economic power? Is the possibility of our sea lanes of communication being cut so low that we should ignore it? I think not, and a strategy for greater food independence should be a post-COVID priority.
Overnight, COVID-19 cut off the imported farm labour we rely upon so heavily. It’s a very real vulnerability that we rely on so many foreign workers to achieve current levels of food and fibre production.
Biosecurity is the next vulnerability. An outbreak of African swine fever two years ago wiped out one-third of China’s hog population. As recently as 2017, white spot disease, which almost certainly crossed our borders in imported prawns, almost wiped out Queensland’s prawn industry.
Australian farmers have been dealing with climate change and adapting to changing environments since European settlement, but the challenges are growing and, according to our scientists, will grow greater again. We’ll find ways to maintain output in the face of hotter and drier weather, but will we be able to do enough? Only time will tell.
Regardless, Australian policymakers will need to demonstrate more urgency in the promotion and progression of weather adaptation plans, more sustainable farming practices and the embrace of productivity-enhancing innovation. Our focus must not be on carbon mitigation alone. We also need a strategy for pursuing more premium markets rather than relying so heavily on product volume into commodity markets, in which, increasingly, we’re price-takers.
More dramatically, we need to accept that we can’t establish food independence without fuel independence and crop-protection independence. We can’t establish fuel independence a willingness to get more crude oil out of the ground. Gas, too, will be critical to the longevity of our food manufacturing plants.
Government must establish pathways for the retention of a capacity to manufacture crop-protection products here in Australia. Looking beyond, new energy must be directed to the biotechnologies that will leave us less dependent on chemicals over time.
How much will this cost and who should pay? Economic rationalism is the policy consensus in our public and private sectors, where we assume markets set prices and the profit margin is the arbiter of viability. But, arguably, food and fuel security provide good reason to consider a departure from the economic orthodoxy.
Extraordinary challenges require extraordinary thinking. We’ve long paid a premium for defence platforms in order to maintain our capacity to repair and service them here in Australia. Surely the capacity to feed ourselves in times of crisis invites extraordinary thinking, too.