"Food continuity is integral to national resilience," ASPI wrote — and a year of events has shown why that is more than rhetoric.
ASPI's April 2025 National Food Security Preparedness Green Paper
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. In the year since its release, that argument has been reinforced, ASPI says, as previously theoretical weaknesses have been pressed into real-world stress.
The Iran–Israel missile exchange and Strait of Hormuz pressures
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 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.
Diesel as the hinge of food continuity: harvests, livestock and refrigeration
ASPI places diesel at the centre of the problem 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.
ASPI reframes modern food security as food continuity — defined in practice by three outcomes: 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 severe stress, those goals can pull apart: supermarket shelves may look full while production capacity quietly degrades or exports are cut back.
National Food Supply Chain Assessment and the four government pillars
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. The government’s response focuses on four pillars, deliberately designed to move together rather than sequentially:
- 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.
ASPI warns there is a risk in thinking severe system stress will be solved by a single technological fix: new technologies will help over time, but none removes the near-term problem that food continuity depends on fuel, freight, labour, storage and coordination working together.
Coordination across government, industry and defence
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. ASPI warns that this needs to be fixed because when a harvest window, fuel squeeze and freight bottleneck collide, they do not wait for interdepartmental coordination cycles. 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.
ASPI also frames food, fuel and freight continuity as preconditions for domestic stability, economic endurance and regional credibility; Australia’s food system supports regional food availability and broader Indo‑Pacific resilience at a time when global supply chains are becoming more contested and less predictable.
What this means for farmers, policymakers, and regional partners
- Farmers and regional operators: the immediate pressure point is fuel availability — delayed diesel deliveries can strand harvests, stress animal welfare and trigger cascading financial losses across communities.
- Policymakers and regulators: the challenge is coordination as much as supply; the Interim Assessment points to the need to keep fuel and credit moving, build regional storage buffers, reduce diesel imports and invest in sovereign capability in parallel.
- Regional partners and buyers: Australia’s ability to remain a reliable food supplier depends on sustaining continuity under pressure, a capacity ASPI links directly to broader Indo‑Pacific resilience.
Progress has been made: ASPI’s green paper helped push food-system resilience into mainstream strategic discussion, and recent events accelerated that shift. The danger now, ASPI warns, is complacency. The record is clear — and blunt: modern food security depends on systems governments and industry cannot coordinate fast enough under severe stress. The question left for policymakers and industry alike is not whether to shore up those systems, but whether the four pillars will be implemented together, and soon enough, to stop the system bending and breaking when the next pressure arrives.
