Designing food secure systems for Australia – “What is everyone’s responsibility becomes no one’s priority.”
April 10, 2026
By Shaun Coffey FTSE FAIA CRSNZ FAICD
Australia is entering a decisive phase in how it understands and approaches food security.
The recently released Farm Policy Journal issue, Designing Food-Secure Systems, signals a shift in thinking, from production and output toward system design, governance and long-term capability. The papers have deeper implications for Australia’s emerging National Food Security Strategy. At its core is a single proposition.
The central proposition
Food security is not simply a matter of aggregate food production. It is a property of the wider system within which food is produced, moved, priced, governed and consumed. The editorial sets the tone by arguing that food security is the product not only of agricultural output, but of the broader architecture within which that output is produced, distributed and governed.
Across the issue, the common challenge is to design systems capable of delivering stable, equitable and sustainable outcomes under increasing uncertainty.
This is a major shift in emphasis from production to architecture, from sectoral analysis to systems analysis, and from recovery to preparedness. Food security has become a question of national coordination, resilience, institutional design, and public purpose, and can no longer be siloed as solely an agricultural issue.
Food security is a systems question
Several papers make the same foundational point in different ways. Lobb shows that food security outcomes arise from the interaction of market structures and institutional frameworks. Miller argues that the agrifood system is complex, with feedback loops that can stabilise or destabilise outcomes. Kotir and colleagues go further, presenting food security as a system property rather than a production metric, and arguing for an integrated systems intervention portfolio rather than disconnected sectoral programs.
Taken together, the papers reject a narrow production-centred view. They argue that food security depends on how incentives, institutions, logistics, regulation, research, finance and consumer access fit together. That is the decisive shift in the issue.
Export strength does not equal food security
The issue repeatedly challenges the assumption that a strong exporting nation is automatically food secure. Lobb shows that around 70 per cent of Australian agricultural production by value is exported and explains how export orientation has become a dominant system property, reinforced by trade policy, research priorities, production systems, and performance measures. Guerin and Fisher push the point further by arguing that domestic usability under stress, not export volume, is the proper test of food security.
This matters because it exposes a gap in national thinking. Export success remains economically valuable and strategically important. Yet a system optimised for export performance can still leave domestic affordability, access and resilience underdeveloped. The issue does not call for abandoning exports. It calls for balancing export competitiveness with domestic resilience.
Fragmentation is a structural weakness
A strong thread through the journal is the fragmentation of ownership and accountability. Lobb notes that food security spans multiple portfolios in the Australian government and that no single policy owner has clear accountability for outcomes.
“What is everyone’s responsibility becomes no one’s priority.”
Guerin and Fisher make a similar point, arguing that responsibilities and investments sit across portfolios and markets, so no one is accountable for end-to-end domestic usability during disruption. The editorial likewise highlights the absence of a coherent institutional home for food security policy.
This is a fundamental design flaw: a fragmented system can remain active, funded, and busy while lacking strategic coherence, underscoring the need for clearer national stewardship, stronger cross-portfolio governance, and a shared language of responsibility beyond agriculture alone.
Efficiency and resilience are not the same thing
The journal is clear that efficiency has delivered real benefits, but it has also created fragility. The editorial summarises Trethewey’s contribution as a warning about single points of failure in highly optimised supply chains. Kotir and colleagues provide practical examples of how centralised food distribution systems buckle under stress, whereas smaller, more local networks can recover faster.
Resilience should be elevated alongside efficiency as an explicit and central objective. This provides a useful policy distinction. Efficiency seeks lean performance under normal conditions, and resilience seeks continuity under disturbance. National food security requires both, but the current system appears weighted too heavily toward the former.
Food security is also about access, affordability and nutrition
One of the strengths of the issue is that it broadens the scope of food security beyond aggregate supply. Lobb identifies five dimensions: availability, accessibility, affordability, safety and nutrition. Her case studies show how food-producing regions can still experience food insecurity, and how fresh, healthy food can be harder to access than processed alternatives. The remote grocery comparison is especially powerful, with a capital city basket averaging $44.70 and four remote First Nations community stores averaging $99.38. She also notes that fewer than 10 per cent of Australians meet recommended daily vegetable intake guidelines.
This impacts the public debate and our flawed stories. It moves food security away from comforting aggregate narratives and toward the lived reality of households, especially lower-income, regional and remote communities.
Research and other enabling systems are a strategic infrastructure
The issue’s second section strengthens the argument by focusing on enabling mechanisms. The editorial summarises finance as a core determinant of resilience, critical infrastructure as including labour and imported inputs, and agricultural research, especially international research, as a form of strategic infrastructure. The common message is that food security rests on enabling systems that are often invisible until they fail, and that extend well beyond our national borders.
International agricultural research is not peripheral to Australia’s food security interests. It is part of the architecture that helps manage transboundary and cumulative risks, captures spill-ins from a much larger global research effort, and builds our domestic capabilities. Food security is world security.
The implications for Australia
The issue points to five broad implications for national policy.
- Australia needs a wider definition of food security, one that includes affordability, access, nutrition and resilience under stress, not production volume alone.
- The National Food Security Strategy must treat food security as a whole-of-system challenge, requiring governance arrangements that can work across agriculture, health, trade, defence, infrastructure, labour, environment and biosecurity.
- Resilience needs to become an explicit objective in policy design, investment settings and performance measurement. It cannot remain an afterthought to efficiency. The trade-offs need be identified and managed.
- Public good investments, especially in research, enabling infrastructure, preparedness and coordination, should be understood as long-terms strategic assets rather than discretionary spending lines.
- Australia needs better methods for identifying feedback loops, hidden dependencies and unintended consequences. This is where systems thinking becomes practical, not rhetorical.
Conclusion
The true significance of The Farm Policy Journal issue lies in the emerging shift in consensus it captures.
Food security, once a narrow question of supply, now needs to be treated as a question of design. This is both demanding and useful. It reflects the realities of climate volatility, geopolitical instability, concentrated markets, fragile logistics and rising public concern about cost and access.
The National Food Security Strategy is therefore more than a policy exercise. It is a chance to decide whether food security will remain an assumption or become an intentional national capability. We know we can grow enough food. We still have to build a system capable of ensuring food security for Australians when the pressure comes.
On that question, the journal is clear. We still have important design work to do.
