Towards a state of the food system report for Australia

This report is targeted at those who are passionate about our food system delivering sustainability, nutrition, food safety outcomes.  It will also likely be of interest to those in government who are custodians of the governance of our food system, to industry leaders who play a key role, and civil society leaders of organisations concerned about the state and trajectory of Australia’s food system. 

This targeting reflects the key messages of the report. We have achieved economic success by pursuing market efficiency, and now selective and well-designed public leadership is necessary to direct the food system to a range of broader economic, sustainability, equity and health goals. All of these goals require complementary reporting and enabling policy led by public sector agencies with a strong vision to help Australians design and take action towards the future food systems they want.

The term food system refers to all the components that are required to feed people. It involves the processes of producing, distributing and consuming food and food ingredients, from natural resources like water and soils that support agricultural production, through the manufacturing, processing and distribution of food, to its impacts on nutrition and human health.

Australia’s food system is facing a range of challenges and opportunities that arise from often quite surprising interactions across the system. We often can’t see the interactions we need to manage using current reporting systems. For example:

• Economic statistics can suggest that agriculture is booming, but overlook the cost of environmental impacts arising from water use, declining biodiversity and soil health and growing greenhouse gas emissions. (See Sustainability, Hidden Costs and Economics)
• Our preference for convenience shapes our food environments and influences our health; it’s why we purchase mostly from supermarkets, and also why there is an increase in consumption of ultra-processed food. The negative health outcomes aren’t linked to our food system currently. (See Nutrition and Retail Environment)
• New food processing technologies allow us to solve specific problems, such as what to do with excess production, how to repurpose agricultural waste, or how to meet demand for plant-based food ingredients. But these while these technologies solve individual problems, they also need to be looked at from a system’s perspective, because they can also impact on areas we may not be thinking of, such as the safety of our food, or the combined environmental impact of a societal change in diets.  (See Food Safety, Circular Economy, Life Cycle Assessment, and Manufacturing)

The food system is so big and complex that we need prioritise rather than generalise. Attempts to report on everything don’t provide much guidance on what we need to do next. We also need to keep up to date with changes in our food system and the goals we have for it.

Current priorities for managing Australia’s food system identified in this report include:

• Enabling the proactive design of healthier and more affordable food environments. 
• Enabling high value regional food manufacturing and food ecosystems to stimulate regional economies and improve food environments. 
• Support efforts to minimise and repurpose waste and improve sustainability across the food system. 

This report is full of statistics; however the report highlights that a plethora of data on the food system misses the point. We highlight the importance of the types of data that are collected, and how we connect those data – this can help us report on those aspects where we can strengthen the way we manage it going forward. Each Insight chapter features infographics that summarise some of these stats, but here are some:

• The food system adds more than $200 billion to Australia’s economy and employs 3.5 million people
• Almost one-third of Australian households experience moderate or severe food insecurity each year.
• Around two-thirds of Australian adults and almost one-third of children and adolescents are overweight.
• 85% of Australian groceries are purchased from major supermarket chains.
• Public health costs associated with foodborne illness in Australia approach $3 billion annually.
• Within the Australian Government, responsibility for food policy has become dispersed among 11 different portfolios.
• Australia generates 33 million tonnes of organic waste each year, much of which is not repurposed and ends up in landfill.
• Australia’s food system has the highest per capita hidden environmental and health costs in the world, with estimates ranging from $98 billion to $274 billion in net present value terms.
• Just under 90% of food manufacturing businesses are small-to-medium enterprises with less than 20 employees, and reporting on factors for their success is underdeveloped.

We tend to latch onto high profile statistics, and they can distract us from understanding the food system interactions that cause them. We naturally tend to manage the things we can measure at the risk of ignoring parts of the food system we can’t see. This report highlights that reporting is highly underdeveloped for some critical components of the food system – especially environmental sustainability and Indigenous food systems – and misleading for other components. It suggest ways of balancing food system reporting to meet a more balanced set of economic, sustainability, equity and health goals.