In the year or so since ASPI released its National Food Security Preparedness Green Paper, its argument that Australia should strengthen its food system as a matter of national security has been reinforced with uncomfortable clarity.
The April 2025 green paper argued that Australia’s food system carried strategic vulnerabilities that national-security policy hadn’t properly confronted, and that governments needed to act before a crisis rather than during one.
The first direct Iran–Israel missile exchange rattled global energy markets and exposed how quickly geopolitical instability can pressurise domestic supply chains in a country as import dependent as Australia. Disruption around the Strait of Hormuz then turned a long-discussed vulnerability into a real-life issue. As diesel prices rose sharply, fuel could not be delivered to farms, freight operators and regional distributors fast enough to preserve continuity where and when it was needed.
This is critical because modern food security no longer rests simply on production. Australia may grow more than enough food to feed itself, but the systems that move, power and sustain food need to continue functioning when pressure arrives simultaneously across the economy.
Diesel sits at the centre of that challenge because it keeps large parts of Australia’s food system operating. Once fuel availability tightens at the regional level, the gap between normal operations and serious disruption narrows quickly. Livestock welfare, refrigeration, harvesting, freight movement and irrigation all compress into the same operational problem. In regional Australia, a delayed diesel delivery during harvest means stranded crops, failed freight schedules, animal welfare pressure and cascading financial losses across entire communities. In some systems the window between continuity and failure is measured in days rather than weeks.
Modern food security should be understood in terms of food continuity – the ability of the systems that produce, process, manufacture and distribute food to keep working when pressure arrives across the economy. In practice, food continuity means three things: people can still afford to eat, farms and supply chains keep operating, and Australia can keep being a reliable food supplier to the region even under pressure.
Under normal conditions those goals line up comfortably. Under severe stress they can pull apart. A country can keep supermarket shelves looking full while quietly degrading production capacity or cutting back exports its neighbours depend on. What really matters is whether fuel, freight, labour, finance, storage and energy can still be coordinated when they are all under pressure at once.
That explains why the National Food Supply Chain Assessment announced by Agriculture Minister Julie Collins carries strategic weight. The Interim Assessment completed in April identified the core near-term risk that available fuel, credit and logistics may not translate into continuity across the food supply chain when stress intensifies.
This is as much a coordination problem as a supply problem. The government’s response focuses on four pillars: keep fuel and credit moving, build regional storage buffers, reduce dependence on imported diesel, and invest in more sovereign fuel and energy capability over the longer term. Crucially, the pillars are designed to move together rather than sequentially.
There is a risk in thinking severe system stress will be solved by a single technological fix. New technologies – from cleaner fuels to smarter logistics and more controlled farming environments – will help over time, but none of them removes the near-term problem that food continuity depends on fuel, freight, labour, storage and coordination working together.
Australia needs a clearer view of where concentrated dependence creates strategic vulnerabilities, and where a modest amount of targeted investment could prevent the system bending and breaking in a crisis.
Food continuity is integral to national resilience. Defence has begun adjusting its fuel posture in response to a more contested strategic environment, but the wider civilian systems that sustain the population, support industry and underpin force generation are only now starting to attract comparable attention. Food, fuel and freight continuity are preconditions for domestic stability, economic endurance and regional credibility. Australia’s food system also supports regional food availability and broader Indo-Pacific resilience at a time when global supply chains are becoming more contested and less predictable.
Food continuity cuts across agriculture, transport, energy, finance, emergency management and national security, yet responsibilities are split across different levels of government and much of the infrastructure is privately owned. This needs to be fixed, because when a harvest window, fuel squeeze and freight bottleneck collide, they do not wait for interdepartmental coordination cycles.
Australia has made significant progress over the past year. ASPI’s green paper helped push food-system resilience into mainstream strategic discussion, and recent events have accelerated that shift.
The risk now is complacency. Modern food security depends on systems that governments and industry cannot coordinate fast enough under severe stress, and Australia needs to act before it is too late.
