Wednesday, 21 September 2022

Food supply

Ms SHEED (Shepparton) (17:28): It grieves me to have to grieve on the last day of the 59th Parliament, but I do take the opportunity to draw attention to what I regard as a very important matter, and that is the lack of attention to issues of food security, diversity of food production and supply chain issues here in Victoria and more broadly across Australia.

I believe that ministers holding the portfolios of agriculture and water should be represented in the Legislative Assembly of this Parliament, this house that forms government. These are high-profile portfolios, deserving of much more attention. Just as we saw the Minister for Health take on a major role during the pandemic, so too will our agriculture and water ministers in the years ahead, as food security and associated issues become more precarious.

In the Shepparton district we have already established the main elements needed to create an enviable circular economy to safeguard our communities from future global disasters. We have food production, manufacturing and the elements that are needed to create our own energy and repurpose or dispose of waste in an environmentally safe manner if it is invested in further.

Never before were we so aware of how vulnerable we were as a community, as a nation and as a local district as when we saw the bare shelves in supermarkets during the pandemic. This was due to a shortage of international, interstate and local transport to bring in supplies, and some production was also impacted due to the high demand and staff shortages. It was only when we were pushed into a corner and supplies of surgical masks from China dried up that the state and federal governments looked to our local medical suppliers for the manufacture of masks. Med-Con in Shepparton suddenly had the army in there, grew in size dramatically and was serving the whole country. These essential supplies need to be produced within our own country. We have now seen how vulnerable we can be, how quickly borders can close and how those impacts can spread out across the country so quickly. We want industries to survive and thrive, and we want to keep our workers in stable full-time work not just when a sudden need arises and within a very short time governments are looking back to other countries for the cheapest source of supply.

In the Goulburn Valley we know how to manufacture everything from tinned fruit to steel tanks so focusing on our manufacturing industries could see our region become a powerhouse for the supply of food and other essential goods not just for our local district but for the entire state and help to provide food security for our region. We are growing solar energy in our region. Wind energy is popping up all over our state. We are looking at innovative ways to re-use waste to make fuel.

The fundamental problem that we have here is that while we have the capacity to produce food, we rely on a huge amount of overseas imports for the inputs into agriculture. Let me just tell you a few startling things. Perhaps before doing that, though, I will just say that ABARES—the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences—in their 2020 report indicated that Australia does not have a food security problem. They relied on issues of affordability, availability, stable domestic supply, surpluses for export, but they did fail to take into account in considering that the fact that we import huge amounts of our fuel. Something like 90 per cent of our fuel is an input that we import from overseas. We do not have the capacity here to produce so much of those products that are absolutely pivotal to driving a tractor, to driving a truck, to shifting goods around the country.

Again, the pandemic delivered so many shocks to us, but it was not just that. We saw the fires of 2019–20. We are seeing more and more wild weather with floods all along the eastern seaboard. More floods are predicted and in fact are happening now. The Murray River is flowing over its banks in many places. All our dams are full, all our water storages are full, the ground is wet and we are looking at a significant risk with the La Niña effect that is currently looking at us.

There are potentials for ongoing shocks to our food supply chain and it has really exposed some of our weaknesses. Fruit and vegetable crops were wiped out by unseasonable rain in Queensland in recent times. It was regarded as an emergency. New South Wales wheat and canola farmers are facing 50 per cent yield losses after record rainfalls. These are just some of the headlines in Australia about what has been happening and where our vulnerabilities could lie.

Looking overseas—it is not just here in Australia, environmental shocks are being experienced all over the world—all over the Northern Hemisphere countries are experiencing drought and extreme weather conditions. We often do not take notice of that. Europe’s flood damage is beginning to emerge. Droughts, with crop yields down by 45 per cent in England. Farmers fear for future harvests as climate change takes its toll on Spanish agriculture. Hungary harvests 3.9 million tonnes of wheat, maize and sunflower, crops that are at serious risk because of the drought. All these things are happening in other countries. In the Middle East climate change is triggering intense drought throughout Iraq, Syria’s drought put Assad’s ‘year of wheat’ in peril and the rise in Turkish food prices is sparking fear and food shortages—all of these things. I could go on at length about every country that is currently and has in recent months been highlighting the damage being done to their food supplies by drought, and often by floods—China had floods. The heating up of the planet is having an impact.

So the concerns this raises are about how we might think about dealing with it. Not only is it fuel that we import 90 per cent of, we import 70 per cent of the fertiliser that we use on our crops throughout Australia. Now, that comes to some large degree from Russia, so the war in Ukraine is having a very significant effect on the ability we have to continue to import the fertiliser we need for our crops. But presently it has an impact on the cost of those imports, and those sorts of things again impact on Australia. Australia does not have the economy of scale to produce its own seeds and tissue culture, so we are relying heavily on major international companies for imports of those sorts of products. Australia imports about 80 per cent of its urea—that is the fertiliser that is really critical to so much crop production. The grocery manufacturing sector relies on supply of imported inputs, including ingredients, raw materials and packaging. So we might all sit here thinking how amazing we are—we grow wheat, we grow canola, we grow sunflowers, we grow vegetables, we have amazing horticulture—but we simply cannot do it unless we have that capacity to import so much of the product that goes into that whole production. It is a cause for concern.

Here in Australia we have no national body looking at the issue of food security. We have many different organisations looking at it, like the CSIRO. You could probably name five or 10 different organisations or universities who are doing studies—you see articles in newspapers about the study done at Melbourne University raising concerns about food security—but we do not actually have one body looking at it. Now, we have departments of agriculture; we should have departments of agriculture and food security. We can look at our capacity to grow things, but we are not looking at our capacity to get what we need into this country or to produce here the things that we need to actually be able to grow those things, and that makes us really very vulnerable.

Even things like harvesting—we have got very sophisticated harvesting equipment now, and during the pandemic we saw pilots who were no longer flying planes going out to Western Australia and learning how to drive some of the extraordinarily expensive and sophisticated machinery that is used on farms. They were able to do that, but something like 30 per cent of specialist harvesting machinery staff come from outside Australia, so when it comes to harvesting those massive wheat crops across Western Australia, western New South Wales and the like, the staff that we need to do that in large part are coming from overseas. We have seen even more recently with the closure of our borders the fact that a lot of our fruit produce has not been able to be picked in a timely manner and taken to market. We have had a shortage of fruit pickers. We saw that the countries of Vanuatu, Samoa—these Pacific Islands countries—that were on a yearly basis sending workers here during the fruit production season, with borders closed they were not coming. Fortunately some of that is starting again, but it did really highlight the vulnerability we have in that we do not have the people or the capacity to pick it. We might be able to grow it, but we have not got the whole chain in order to be able to produce it, pick it and get it to market. It is concerning.

I drive up and down the highway a lot, so Audible is my best friend, and I have recently been listening to Gabrielle Chan’s book Why You Should Give a F About Farming. It is a very salutary exposé of all these issues that I am talking about right now: about what has happened in farming, about the impacts of globalisation, about the fact that we have lost so many of our small farmers in recent times, about the fact that here in Victoria our largest water holder is a Canadian pension fund—and then you go to the New York police pension fund. I mean, these are factors that we have allowed to arise over a period of time just because of market forces. People come in, they have got the money, they buy the water, they buy the land—we have got massive almond crops growing across northern New South Wales. They will not be enough to feed us should we see our borders close, should we have some sort of catastrophe. We might have almond milk and we might have almonds, but really we need more than cotton and almonds. We need really significant food production across the whole spectrum.

One of the things that our previous water minister, the member for Bellarine, was always very concerned about was the fact that we need to maintain our diversity, and that is one thing that in the Goulburn Valley we have been able to do, although it is now very challenged. The number of dairy farmers in our region was massively reduced and largely because of water buybacks—something like $500 million worth of production was taken out of our region because we gave up so much water to the environment during the last 12 years or 11 years of the plan, a plan that is now coming to an end.

All of these things are having an impact. I think we have all seen and noticed the effects of rising prices for food. When I go and talk to my community at the moment, the cost of living is the issue that they are the most concerned about. It is food prices; it is rent; it is petrol prices. These are issues which really focus people’s minds, because they are so basic—they are so much about day-to-day living. So it is incredibly important that in the next Parliament these portfolios of water and agriculture and food security are given absolute priority and that we do highlight that the government takes the lead on this and establishes a food security council or at least lobbies the federal government to have a federal body that does that, because all we have got at the moment are defence experts, public policy types, the occasional journalist, people like this talking about the issues but no-one bringing it together, nobody thinking about the future, nobody thinking about those inputs. We need to really make sure that we as a community have the security we need.