The day I agreed with an admiral - on security, not on sailing (Why SHRMP.bio)

18 September 2026

I didn’t expect that, when I started working on a seafood startup, I would end up in an email exchange with an admiral. A pleasant one.

Two years ago I built a set of scenarios for the future of food to work out whether building SHRMP.bio made sense. They kept returning the same uncomfortable answer: that in the futures worth planning for, the highest-value asset may not be the food itself but the means to make it — the technology, the control of it, the land and water it comes from (see Australia says it has no food-security problem. I am not convinced.).

Somewhere in that work I read a piece by a retired Chief of the Defence Force, arguing that the military must plan for climate change. I am not a defence person. Yet, I found the argument hard to fault — which unsettled me much more than agreeing to it did.

The line that stopped me was one he quoted — a Defence White Paper’s judgement on whether competition for resources leads to war. It was meant to reassure: rising demand for commodities is unlikely to cause major conflict “as long as the global market operates freely,” because it is cheaper to buy a commodity than to fight for it. The whole comfort of the sentence lives in that one clause. And the clause is exactly what a hotter, more crowded, more fractured world puts under strain — which the passage itself conceded, naming the South China Sea as where the miscalculation might start.

About the geopolitics itself I will ask rather than tell, because I cannot assess a defence posture and I will not pretend to - waters too deep for me. The questions I am left with:

If the entire national case for food security rests on the market staying open — and it does; the official reasoning is that our export surplus keeps us safe because there is a lot of it and it can be traded — then what happens to that safety when the market does not stay open? What is an export surplus you cannot sell, or cannot move on terms you control? Is it still a shield, or is it closer to inventory someone else may decide the price of? And who, exactly, is assumed to keep the market free — because if the answer is the power that built the trading order, is that assumption as safe this decade as it was when the White Paper was written?

I noticed that the people whose job is to think in long horizons reached the uncomfortable version of such questions years ago. The admiral made a point about time frames and time scales I have not been able to put down, because they are our own development horizons in biotechnology and deep-tech. The military plans on cycles of eighteen to twenty years, because that is how long a capability takes to build — so the decisions shaping the country’s defence in the 2050s are being made now. You do not get to start when the crisis lands. You start two decades early, or you resort to crisis management.

It took me about forty years and a shrimp company to understand one fundamental of the world: A country in an uncertain time needs two tools it is always tempted to underinvest in, because both have to be paid for long before they are needed: the best diplomatic corps it can build, to negotiate its way through trade — or out of trouble — and enough defensive weight that ending the negotiation looks expensive to anyone who might try. Not to fight. To make not-fighting the cheaper option, for everyone, for as long as possible.

And that, unexpectedly, was the argument SHRMP.bio has been making at the scale of one small company running university projects with a handful of students. Today’s commercial terms are not the ones that will matter — not for us, not for aquaculture, not for food production. The future’s terms will. And when they arrive, the highest-value asset will not be the food itself but the means to make it: the technology, the control of it, and the land and water it comes from.

I found it a rather strange day to find some of my own SHRMP conclusions already written, in a place I did not initially consider looking, by people who plan wars for a living. Partially in desperation to get some strategic input from someone who does not think in a two-year cycle (I have not found many!), and in a magnitude better use of my time than filling in another BMC, I emailed an admiral — a retired Chief of the Defence Force, now at a think tank. And I got a response. Confirmation and encouragement. And SHRMP.bio sailed on, even without startup support programmes, deep-tech incubators, incubators in general. Because we know the topic, at least, matters.

Written by an outsider to all of this — a biotech founder whose tanks may hold shrimp one day, not ammunition. One of a series on how SHRMP.bio reasoned its way to its strategy.

Sources, both public: Chris Barrie, “Why the defence force must plan for climate change” (ABC, 2013), and the ASLCG’s Food Fight report (2022).