Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian government's international aid agency, AusAID, says:

Food security exists when populations have access on an ongoing basis to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

The United Nations has a subgroup called the Food and Agriculture Organization, which is the body tasked with monitoring and maintaining food production and demand. The FAO says that one billion people in the world live with chronic hunger and that this is expected to worsen. In its report Investing in food security it stated -

With global population expected to reach more than nine billion by 2050, FAO estimates that agricultural production will need to grow by 70 percent if it is to keep the world's population fed and healthy. Only about 10 percent of this growth will come from availability of new lands which means that 90 per cent will need to come from intensification of current production. Ensuring that this intensification is sustainable will require enormous investments for primary agriculture and storage and processing infrastructure—just to stay abreast of the population growth.

These comments are really concerning, and should be, for all of us, but what is more concerning is the expectation that 10 per cent of the growth in food production will come from new lands. In many developed countries the amount of land available for food production is actually in decline. According to the report by Daniels and Bower in 1997 entitled Holding our ground: protecting America's farms and farmland, the United States of America loses over a million acres of farmland to urban sprawl every year.

In Australia, a report by former member Ian Sinclair estimated that only 10 per cent of Australia's land mass is arable land suitable for soil based agriculture and livestock production. Much of this land is along the highly populated coastal regions where, like America, land is being lost to urban expansion. Food production is not only limited by land, inadequate water is the other great constraint. Worldwide predictions of declining rainfall in food producing areas will continue to impact on our capacity to produce food.

Australia is in a unique position to help address world food shortages and we have some of the best farmers in the world who have the capacity to produce clean, high-volume, high-quality food—one of the key issues Australia has. Our sustainable, competitive advantage, our capacity to produce world class, high-volume, clean, quality food is something none of us should take for granted. I suggest that in the future the capacity to produce quality, clean food will become even more valuable.

Australia is a major food producing nation, with production in 2007-08 measured at $37.4 billion. Of this $23.4 billion worth of food was exported, leaving $14 billion worth of food in the domestic market. However being an exporter of food, even a net exporter, does not mean that Australia is, by definition, food secure. We should not be complacent. Many of our exports are bulk commodities that do not replace domestic variety. In our food exports 72 per cent come from meat, grains, dairy products, wine and seafood. In return, our import profile is much more diverse. Thus as exporters we are secure in our meat and wheat production, but far from secure in an incredible number of other food items. We really need to look at this quite seriously.

In the five years from 2003 to 2008 food imports into Australia increased 50 per cent from $6 billion to $9 billion. During the same period food exports rose by only $1 billion to $23.4 billion, meaning Australia's food trade balance declined by $2 billion. In 2010, the FAO Committee on World Food Security met to discuss food security policy and a number of issues were raised. (Time expired)