Overview – Towards a state of the food system
Authors Rohan Nelson, Andy Hall, Lilly Lim-Camacho & Cathy Robinson
This report is a first step towards regular reporting on the state of Australia’s food system. It highlights opportunities to better recognise and manage Australia’s food system by highlighting gaps and biases in reporting that obscure important food system interactions. The report is organised around the steps that we need to take to move from analysing Australia’s food system to managing it better. Recognising Australia’s food system is a necessary step towards allocating responsibility for managing it. In turn, allocating responsibility helps us to more deliberately enable interactions across the food system that can help us manage challenges and create new opportunities.
Key points
- Australia’s food system generates around $800 billion each year, but focusing on the production alone limits our view of the food system’s real value to Australian society.
- Public sector leadership is needed to balance sectoral economic goals with broader economic, sustainability, equity and health goals for Australia’s food system.
- We have well-developed mechanisms enabling the public sector to lead on important societal goals for our food system that businesses lack commercial incentives to address.
- Reporting on sectoral economic goals is crowding out reporting on broader economic, sustainability, equity and health goals for Australia’s food system.