Pauline Hanson has called for Australia to become more self-reliant in food production, arguing that national security depends on backing farmers, protecting farmland and abandoning net zero policies.
But a new economic analysis suggests the biggest threats to Australia’s food security lie elsewhere, even as it lends support to parts of the One Nation leader’s broader argument.
In a statement released this week, Hanson said Australia should “support Australian farmers, protect productive farmland, strengthen regional processing and ensure Australia can always feed its own people first”.
She argued food self-reliance depended on “removing the cost of net-zero policies and backing Australian farmers to produce more food”.
However, The Balance Sheet, a new research paper examining Australia’s food economy, does not identify Australia’s emissions reduction policies as the principal cause of rising food costs or declining farm profitability. Instead, it points to a combination of imported fertiliser dependence, volatile global energy prices, falling agricultural research investment, slowing productivity growth, labour shortages and the growing impact of climate change on farm production.
The report notes Australia’s last domestic urea fertiliser plant closed in 2023 after struggling with gas prices, leaving farmers entirely reliant on imported fertiliser, while conflict in the Middle East later drove fertiliser costs sharply higher. It stops short of attributing those developments to Australia’s net zero policies.
The research also argues Australia has become highly effective at producing and exporting raw agricultural commodities while steadily losing higher-value food manufacturing
Yet on several other points, the report reaches conclusions that closely resemble Hanson’s concerns.
It finds Australia grows enough food to feed about 70 million people, more than twice its population, but remains heavily dependent on imported inputs, including all of its urea fertiliser, much of its agricultural machinery and chemicals, and around 62 per cent of the seafood Australians consume. It concludes the country is “self-sufficient at the plate, dependent at the input gate”, arguing that supply chain resilience has become one of Australia’s biggest strategic vulnerabilities.
The research also argues Australia has become highly effective at producing and exporting raw agricultural commodities while steadily losing higher-value food manufacturing. It says food processing remains Australia’s largest manufacturing industry but warns investment, research and value-adding capacity have weakened over time, leaving more of the economic value generated from Australian produce to be captured overseas.
Rather than recommending Australia export less food, the paper argues for rebuilding resilience through domestic fertiliser production, greater investment in agricultural research, stronger regional manufacturing and more secure supply chains.
Its concluding assessment is that Australia’s farms are not the weak link.
“The paddock performs,” the report says. “It is everything between the paddock and the plate that carries the strain.”
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