For nearly three years SHRMP.bio looked for the help a company like ours needs. Australia's agrifood leaders have now diagnosed why we couldn't find it.
19 October 2026
“We are still mainly crops and rocks; we don’t have a sophisticated food manufacturing sector.”
One of the more than a hundred people consulted for a national report on Australian agrifood said that, and the report’s own numbers do not argue. Australia ranks seventy-fourth of a hundred and forty-five countries on Harvard’s Economic Complexity Index — down from sixty-first in 2012, and second-lowest in the OECD.[^src] Manufacturing has fallen to 5.1 per cent of GDP, the lowest in the OECD. And Australia exports seventy-one per cent of its agricultural output as commodities, in the report’s words, “for offshore customers to convert into higher-value products.” We grow it, ship it, and buy back what someone else made of it.
The report is A Systems Thinking Approach to Australian Agrifood, published in September by the Australian Agrifood System Alliance and commissioned by AgriFutures Australia with the support of GRDC. Its authors include a CSIRO board member, a former managing director of the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, evokeAG’s programme lead, and people from Meat & Livestock Australia, KPMG, Deloitte and McKinsey. It drew on more than a hundred consultations and a workshop of two hundred people. It is not about any one industry. It is about how the system around all of them is organised.
Its diagnosis fits in three words from one of its own headings: program-rich, system-poor. Fifteen research and development corporations, a crowd of CRCs, hubs and agencies, and, across government, more than two hundred research and innovation programmes spread over more than a dozen portfolios. Each does useful work; the effort, the report says, “does not always compound into national outcomes.” The same barriers recur in every area it examined: levy rules that reward near-term, commodity-specific outputs; funding cycles shorter than the problems they fund; “no accountable steward and no clear entry point.” Innovation stalls between pilot and adoption. And the cost of navigating all of it falls hardest, the report notes, on “small and medium enterprises looking for an obvious front door.”
That sentence describes nearly three years of SHRMP.bio: a small company with a long-horizon biology programme, passed politely from one part of the system to the next, each explaining — reasonably — that the project belonged somewhere else. The report calls it structural.
Where the report points, it points the same way our strategy does. The countries that outrank Australia, it finds, have built the architecture that converts agricultural strength “into value-added products, manufactured exports, patented intellectual property and sovereign capability.” Its priority missions include sovereign food systems and domestic value creation. It names advanced protein manufacturing among Australia’s untapped capabilities. One contributor put the security argument in nine words: “Agriculture should be on the same footing as defence.” And the report’s map of who makes up Australian agrifood lists, among the core producers, “genetics and breeding providers” — the layer underneath every farm that SHRMP.bio is trying to build.
Aquaculture appears in the report twice: once in the definition of what the agrifood system includes, and once as a line on that same map. It is not among the six national challenges, the six priority missions or the eight recommendations, and the only seafood model in the report is a foreign one — Norway’s seafood innovation cluster, one of eighteen international examples. It is the second national document I have read this year in which aquaculture is in scope and out of sight.
The report’s first mission is renewable energy and bioeconomy; it scored highest of the candidates, thirty of thirty-five, and it is a sensible place to start. Its recommended horizon is seven to ten years. Its last recommendation is a national coordination function to serve as the “durable front door” the system does not yet have. Until that door exists, a company building breeding IP for 2050 needs a research home that can carry the work across the gap the report describes, between pilot and adoption. That is what we are looking for.
The report closes on a contributor’s line: “This is too important to just be another report. Let’s get moving.”
Agreed. SHRMP.bio — and, I am sure, aquaculture — would like to come along.
[^src]: A Systems Thinking Approach to Australian Agrifood, Australian Agrifood System Alliance (commissioned by AgriFutures Australia with GRDC), September 2026. Economic Complexity Index figures are the report’s citation of the Harvard Growth Lab’s Atlas of Economic Complexity (Atlas 10.0); manufacturing share and the 71% commodity export share (ABARES 2020) are as reported. Quotations are from the report and its consultation verbatims.
One of a series on how SHRMP.bio reasoned its way to its strategy.