Australia says it has no food-security problem. I am not convinced. (Why SHRMP.bio)
18 September 2026
Australia’s official position, put plainly, is that it does not have a food-security problem. The reasoning is straightforward: the country produces far more food than it eats, exports something like seventy per cent of its agricultural output, and sits inside a global trading system that spreads supply risk across many producers. A temporary shortage on a supermarket shelf is a logistics hiccup, not a national vulnerability.
As we are working through our CSIRO Innovate to Grow Aquaculture programme, I found myself revisiting some of my thinking behind why I continued working on SHRMP.bio, even when nearly everyone around us focused on the impossible near-term commercial outlook and gave me yet another Business Model Canvas that I refused to fill in. And I realised I never clearly articulated the key factors that kept me from leaving the Aquaculture field then. At its core: the cause matters and the opportunity for the field and for Australia could be substantial. And now, part of a programme that, for the first time for us, provides the right audience, my “why” and our SHRMP.bio “why” are resurfacing. One of the themes behind it all: Food Security. And in fact, it is more Food and Security. And here we start with the Food Security part.
An export surplus is a good position to be in. A country that grows a large multiple of its own needs is better placed than one that imports its calories. The parliamentary inquiry that looked at this in 2023 — Australian Food Story: Feeding the Nation and Beyond — was diligent: thirty-five recommendations, a call for a National Food Plan and a dedicated Minister for Food, real attention to the fragile links like fertiliser and fuel. And you can see what set it off. Parliament’s own framing points to empty supermarket shelves during COVID, the labour and input shortages that followed, and the grain crisis after the invasion of Ukraine — a country that had assumed itself food-secure suddenly asking whether the assumption held. What happened next: The National Food Plan the inquiry called for is now, three years on, still only in development — a strategy called Feeding Australia, funded to the modest tune of a few million dollars from mid-2025, with its expert council still being assembled. Three years to begin building what was argued to be built, urgently. That is not the pace of a country that believes it has a problem to solve. And it supports that not much may have changed since I did work on this topic last, two years ago, so:
On the Economist’s Global Food Security Index, in the category that scores whether a country has any policy commitment to food security — a national strategy, a body held accountable for it — Australia scores a flat zero, against a global average of forty-seven.[^gfsi] Not a low number. Zero. A country certain it has no problem by that measure appears to have built nothing to deal with one. The term “complacency” does not seem to be a matter of opinion; it has been quantified.
The entire “no problem” conclusion rests on a key assumption, unspoken and doing all the work: that global trade keeps working. Our food surplus is a security asset because it can be sold and swapped in an open market. Take away the functioning market and the surplus becomes what it physically is — a large amount of food in one place, far from the mouths that want it, with no guarantee it can be moved or exchanged on terms you control.
There is a subtler gap beneath that one, and it is the reason I, working on the SHRMP.bio food startup end up thinking about security at all. A surplus of food is not the same as a surplus of nutrition. The Riddet Institute’s Sustainable Nutrition Initiative, in New Zealand, has modelled this — their DELTA Model asks not whether the world grows enough calories but whether it delivers enough of the specific nutrients people actually need. Their finding: in aggregate, the world can meet the population’s protein needs to 2050 — if it were distributed evenly. But you cannot meet global nutrient requirements from plants alone, and the binding constraint is not gross protein but the bioavailable nutrients concentrated in animal-source foods. Enough calories, on paper. Not necessarily enough of the right ingredients, in the right places, once distribution is real rather than assumed. One of my conclusions based on this was: the ability to produce nutrient-dense animal protein where it is needed will matter more to some regions than the tonnage of food a supply country can grow and maybe ship to them.
So the surplus argument rests on two assumptions, not one: that trade stays open, and that gross export tonnage matters. This is where my argument parts from the usual one. I am not worried that Australia cannot feed itself; we will probably go on producing far more than we eat.
The real question is not whether we have a surplus, but what makes it valuable. Australia already helps feed the world, and the same index that scores our policy commitment at zero says so plainly: our exports, our agricultural research, and the know-how we pass on all support food security in other countries. That contribution is the valuable part, and it is the part that goes unrecognised at home. Because the shortage the world is heading into is not a shortage of food in the abstract. It is a shortage of the ability to produce nutrient-dense food in the places that need it, as the climate turns hostile and the trade routes stop being reliable. The technologies that close that gap — the kind a national science agency exists to build — are the asset that will matter. And in the national conversation about what this country is and what it is worth, they barely rate a mention.
There is a hard edge to this and that is the Food Security one: Same as the “large amount of food in one place” technology is only valuable if it can be defended and exported — if you can keep it, and sell it, on terms you control. Which turns it into an uncomfortable question. If the world fractures into sovereign food production, and everyone grows their own, what does an export nation bring to the table to negotiate with? But, at least, we would have optionality: if we cannot ship our food surplus, we have also built a layer of technologies the world will need. An additional card in our hand.
To be clear, this is not about whether Australians can afford dinner tonight, another real and current problem, a domestic one of distribution and inequality. My concern is upstream of the supermarket shelf: it is about what the nation produces, what it could produce, and what that could be worth to a world that will need it. We will feed ourselves, and we will probably keep exporting a surplus — though on whose terms, and at what price, is the question the next few decades will decide. What I fear we are quietly getting wrong, right now, is missing a technology opportunity: in agricultural technology broadly, and in aquaculture in particular — a field this country has natural advantage and every structural component required to lead the world in - but does not.
In the context of Food Security, the national confidence seems to depend on one sentence— the global market will keep working. It is precisely the sentence the current decade is calling into question. And this is the second part of my early Food Security journey with SHRMP.bio, the part that moved it much more to the Security end. Because Australia’s security establishment has been there, publicly, with slightly more firepower than I and a 2-person SHRMP.bio team can mount. And they had been much earlier, too: a defence-led report a few years ago found the country ill-prepared not because its own farms will fail, but because food insecurity around Australia — in a warming, crowding region — drives the instability, conflict and displacement that do not stay politely offshore. The same report projected Australia’s own agricultural exports falling by somewhere between a tenth and two-thirds within a handful of years. The people behind it include a former Chief of the Defence Force. It is not a fringe worry. And it is part of my sometimes surprising but always insightful SHRMP.bio journey, too.
-> Part 2 - The day I agreed with an admiral
[^gfsi]: The Economist Impact Global Food Security Index 2022, “Food security and access policy commitments” indicator — Australia 0.0 vs a 47.1 global average — measuring whether a country has a national food security strategy and a body accountable for it. Discussed in Liesel Spencer, “Late to the table: Australian law and policy on food security,” Alternative Law Journal (2024), and in the House Standing Committee on Agriculture inquiry Australian Food Story: Feeding the Nation and Beyond (2023).
One of a series on how SHRMP.bio reasoned its way to its strategy. Part two: The day I agreed with an admiral.