Agriculture and food: Do we need a more holistic approach?

15 May 2024

FSH Director Dr Rohan Nelson presented at a seminar hosted by ABARES for a range of policy stakeholders, with the goal of encouraging more holistic approaches to future, including the data and analytical systems to support it. The presentation reviewed how we think about agriculture and food policy, and growing pressures to integrate these strongly related agendas. It also explores how the data and analysis we use might need to change to support more integrated approaches to agriculture and food policy.

Pressures for change

Pressure to take a more holistic view of agriculture and food policy seem to be arising from three main sources:

  • Leveraging productivity gains
  • The difficulty of improving productivity in highly optimised farming systems is creating incentives to seek productivity gains in other parts of the food system.
  • Meeting environmental sustainability goals
  • Sustainability often requires coherent policy across disparate components of the agrifood system from natural resource management and agriculture, through marketing, distribution and the management of waste, and on to diets and human health.
  • Creating more socially inclusive food systems
  • Participatory and co-design approaches to food system governance are increasingly being used to include civil society in decisions about what future food systems should look like, and acceptable pathways for getting there.

A range of global pressures are contributing:

  • A global focus on sustainability, and pressure to internalise the cost of sustainability and social inclusion into the cost of food.
  • Multilateral processes that have already begun to impose methods/ frameworks unsuitable for Australian conditions.
  • Pressure to extend national reporting frameworks to include robust measures of sustainability and social inclusion.

Discussion

The discussion that followed highlighted:

  • The need to development robust operational metrics for sustainability and social inclusion goals to enable these goals to be managed alongside traditional economic goals.
  • The need for government to react faster and support flexible and evolving agrifood statistical systems as the pace of change globally increases.
  • A deep history of previous work that could be drawn-on to build a national reporting system.
  • The benefits of thinking more inclusively about what food is, such as better recognising the role of fish in Australian diets, and its future potential to expand given its healthy dietary properties.

Next steps

  • Via Food System Horizons, CSIRO and The University of Queensland will reach out to national and state agencies to initiate discussions on what a flexible and adaptive national reporting system for food could look like.