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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones - this is 7am

Our food supply is facing violent shocks - pandemic, war, and flood. Underpinning the problem is the catastrophe of climate change, which will impact not only us but our neighbours too - creating implications for national security.

Today, journalist Esther Linder on a looming food crisis that Australia isn’t prepared for, and what it will mean for how we eat.

It’s Monday August 8

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RUBY:

Esther, food security was not something that you heard talked about much even a couple of years ago. But a lot has changed, including conversations that we now have about food availability. And I think, we've become somewhat used to the idea, I think of certain foods just not being available to us in the supermarkets, right?

ESTHER:

Yeah, I think definitely with the pandemic that was introduced to a lot of people as you know, seeing empty supermarket shelves. I think before that, though, food security was something that a lot of Australians really took for granted. So only a couple of years ago the Australian Food and Grocery Council was actually bragging about how good Australia's food security was. It said in 2020 that quote, "we produce enough food to feed 75 million people". Supply chains were described as safe, efficient and reliable, and our wheat production amounted to 3.5% of the world's entire supply. But since then, there have been a series of shocks to the food supply. Floods have hit crucial food growing regions, like in New South Wales. The war in Ukraine meant that Ukrainian grain was blockaded from leaving the country, which has had huge impacts on countries in Africa and elsewhere. And all kinds of shocks like these are hitting us all at the same time. And the result is we have shortages of food. And things that usually are staples, things that we would normally expect to see. You know, we always expect to see apples at the supermarket because they've been marked as this, like, basic item in the catalogue. But they may not always be available. So, I think for a lot of people, that's the first time that that's happened and it's a bit of a wake up call to how vulnerable our systems really are.

RUBY:

And these shocks that you're talking about, that have happened one by one over the past few years. War is obviously one of them. But the bigger one, the thing that's having the most impact on our access to food here in Australia, that would be the effects of climate change, right?

ESTHER:

Definitely. The core issue is climate change. And I think the way that's playing out is both a long and short-term thing. So for example, the Murray-Darling Basin is the source of half of Australia's agricultural output and because of climate change is expected to halve in production by 2050, meaning that food both in quantity and quality will become scarcer. Now the IPCC has predicted and warned about an increasing amount of disasters, in the general way that temperatures will rise, are all increasing. But it's at the same time harder to see how those shocks and disasters will interact with each other and also with our food supply.

Archival Tape – Newsreader

“Europe is also scorching. In France, meteorologists in the western part of the country are calling it a ‘heat apocalypse’.”

ESTHER:

So while wildfires rage across Western Europe…

Archival Tape – Reporter 1

“The first grain shipments to sail from Ukraine since the start of Russia's invasion has now left”

ESTHER:

…the grain blockade of Ukrainian ports…

Archival Tape – Reporter 2

“The latest study has revealed that nearly all of the world's glaciers are losing mass at an alarming pace, contributing to more than a fifth of the global sea level rise this century”

ESTHER:

And the rate of glacier melt in the poles accelerates exponentially. Research bodies such as the IPCC can't envisage the full impact of these cascading crises. So in essence, the climate is changing and will continue to. And this is only going to put further pressure on domestic food supply. It's essentially inevitable. However, what is within our ability to control is the way in which industry deals with our domestic food supply. As it stands, Australia's supply chain is inefficient at best and it's probably more accurately characterised as absurd.

RUBY:

Okay, well, let's talk about the supply chain and in what ways is it absurdly inefficient?

ESTHER:

Well. So if you grow mangoes in the Northern Territory, they don't immediately get sold on the Northern Territory, they get trucked down to Adelaide, which is a distance of about 3000 kilometres. They get processed and then they get sent back up to Darwin to be sold. And when you think about that in terms of emissions, in terms of fuel, in terms of so many things, it's just really absurd and really inefficient. And that's just one example of how vulnerable our food supply chains are, because in January, that trucking route was cut off by flooding.

Archival Tape – Newsreader 1

“Flooding and severe storm damage in South Australia has the potential to impact major supply routes for weeks to come”

Archival Tape – Newsreader 2

“The supply chain chaos has been caused by severe storms this week which flooded the transcontinental freight line linking the Northern Territory and South Australia.”

Archival Tape – Northern Territory local

“It's been terrible, really. We ran out of food and fresh food in town last Friday. Fortunately, the authorities allowed a truckload of food to come through. The flood waters”

Archival Tape – Northern Territory trader

“We certainly won't be trading tomorrow only because we will be out of stock. If the truck comes in on Monday, we'll be okay.”

ESTHER:

And it meant that there were food shortages in the NT for a couple of weeks. Despite the fact that there's all these farms surrounding Darwin with all of this fresh produce. It couldn't be trucked down to Adelaide, so it couldn't be processed, so it couldn't be sold. And that's kind of ridiculous. That’s just one example of the way our food supply network is set up. That doesn't make sense for a future that's going to be dictated by climate change and the kinds of shocks that we'll continue to see. So while these shortages that we're seeing today on supermarket shelves are obviously annoying and disruptive, they actually point to a bigger issue here that we're failing at multiple levels to properly plan for food security and the impacts of climate change. And that could have an ongoing huge impact on what we're actually able to eat in the future.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Esther, we’ve been talking about the food supply chain, the way that produce is trucked back and forth over vast distances. It’s inefficient, but I think the larger point here is that it’s vulnerable - especially, as we’ve already started to see, to climate events like flooding. If this problem isn’t fixed, if our food security continues to be impacted by climate change, what does that mean for the food we might have access to in the future?

ESTHER:

I think in Australia what you eat is dependent on what you earn and where you live and in essence who you are. So it's not necessarily that people won't have enough food to eat here in Australia. It's more like we won't have the right food. So groups of Australians that already have worse nutrition and have a harder time accessing food are marginalised groups like Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, refugees, people under the poverty line and international students, and that figure may be as high as 13%. And when you're talking about First Nations communities, that figure rises to about 23%. And so I think, you know, those are the immediate problems that we're seeing at home in terms of social policy and on the individual level of someone going to the supermarket and, you know, seeing that the price of broccoli is too high and then choosing something that's cheaper but not quite as nutritious. On the individual level, that's one thing. But then on the global level, you have to think about all of the people that, you know might not even be able to access the supermarket, that they're accessing food through aid or through an agency or, you know, like there's so many other people that have even fewer options than we do.

RUBY:

Right, this is happening all over the world – so does that mean food security isn’t just about what we’ll be eating, but what it could do to our region? Even to our national security?

ESTHER:

Well, it's interesting because in June, a group of defence and policy leaders actually released a report that was looking at this exact issue. It's called the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, and they were looking at how food security and national security are linked essentially. And the report described Australia and the Asia Pacific as a “disaster alley” for climate change, which is pretty concerning. But they say that governments in Canberra haven't properly planned for the impact of cascading events and climate shocks. The report also noted that predictions of two degrees of warming may see Southeast Asia's crop production decline by one third per capita by 2040, as well as Australia's own crop production, which is also meant to decline as a result of increased heat. It says that small island developing nations in the Pacific are especially vulnerable to the effects of drought and flooding on food production.

RUBY:

And coming back to the domestic situation, are there solutions on the table, are there things that can be done here at home to stop this from escalating further? Changing the way we grow and transport food, for example?

ESTHER:

I think looking at it from a holistic perspective is really necessary. You need to look at it not only from the individual level of someone not being able to afford food. So, you know, inflationary pressures, things that we can do to ease the cost of living, but also from a multi-national level, you know, how can we look at changing the crops that we grow or altering them to make them more heat resistant or growing them in different places? There are some adaptation action plans within the states of Victoria and Queensland which are promising. There's also the Goulburn Murray Resilience Strategy, which is essentially a framework made up by a group of over 250 community stakeholders that looks at things from a holistic way. But I think a lot more needs to be done and it needs to be done on a federal level to make sure that people aren't struggling. So at the end of the day, we need shorter supply chains, we need circular economies, we need more equitable access to food. But we also need to look at climate change as something that is going to impact everyone. It's not just the people on the lower end of the system.

RUBY:

Hmm. Esther, thank you so much for your time.

ESTHER:

Thank you, Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…
The UN’s nuclear watchdog has called for an end to military action near Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was hit by shelling on Friday, causing one of the reactors to shut down and creating what the UN watchdog has called a “very real risk of a nuclear disaster”.

And…

A large number of Chinese military aircraft and ships crossed the halfway mark of the Taiwan Strait on Saturday. The median line has been seen as a key territorial boundary between mainland China and Taiwan. The crossing came on the third day of exercises by the Chinese military, which experts say appear to simulate a land strike on the self-governing island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own.

I’m Ruby Jones, This is 7am - see you tomorrow.

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