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Once again, our farmers are under pressure and households are struggling with food bills. As Australia faces yet another period of food instability, Dheepa Jeyapalan explains how and why these cracks have emerged.
The ongoing conflict in the Middle East is adding additional pressure to Australia’s already-precarious food systems. From families to farmers, everyone is beginning to feel the strain. As prices continue to rise and items become more scarce, it's unsurprising that – much like during the pandemic – we’re seeing reports of people ‘pantry loading’, while demand for food banks and assistance programs grows. Most of the pressures we’re seeing right now are symptoms of an ineffective food system that is designed to prioritise profit above all else.
How is the current crisis in the Middle East affecting our farmers and food supply?
Every point of Australia’s food supply chain – from production and food transportation, to the way that we buy and eat our food – is being affected by this crisis.
When Regen Melbourne published our sense making report in 2024, we talked a lot about the illusion of food abundance in Australia. There is a deeply-engrained myth that Australia is a food secure country because we grow so much produce. But in reality, our entire food system is propped up on an export market in which farmers' livelihoods are reliant on them being able to sell food overseas. This is because the supermarket duopoly here doesn’t allow for farmers to make money selling locally.
Now we’re seeing what happens when farmers can’t export produce. And it’s quite grim. Some Australian farmers have stopped planting crops for next season because they don’t know if it will be viable to harvest them in the future. Some farmers in Western Australia are putting carrots they’ve just grown straight back into landfill because they can’t export them. The same is happening with livestock and meat. This is because it would actually cost Australian farmers money to transport the food into our cities or into their communities as there's no mechanism for them to provide in the local market.
How does our food system in Australia rely so heavily on the Strait of Hormuz?
The Strait of Hormuz has long been identified by food systems’ advocates as a vulnerable site. It was included — alongside several other critical corridors and spaces — in Regen Melbourne’s 2024 sense making report, which contains a map from Chatham House pinpointing dozens of these potentially vulnerable transport areas or "choke points” across the globe. These are geographical spots through which so much cargo, fertiliser and fuel is flowing, that if they were to be restricted by, for example, a war, the ripple effect is huge. We’re now seeing that our food system is so vulnerable, a conflict on the other side of the world can risk farmers' livelihoods and impact food supply, despite there being an abundance of produce grown on our shores.
How is this connected with food production and farming methods in Australia?
Our food system here is heavily reliant on fertilisers. All these chemicals come through places like the Strait of Hormuz. In Australia, we have lots of inputs and chemicals – which have negative impacts on environmental and human health – used to grow our food. We’re in this position because our food system is deeply connected to our economic system, which is based on profit and efficiency. Basically, we need to grow food, harvest and send it off really quickly.
So what we're seeing is that farmers who are using regenerative growing methods have been very minimally affected by the crisis. But other farmers are struggling because of the dependence on fertilisers they can’t access. And this is not something that can be switched quickly either, it takes years to transition to regenerative farming.
We know that at the end of 2025 1 in 3 Australian households (3.5 million) were experiencing food insecurity. Are there any facts or figures available yet about the pressure Australian families are under to get food on table?
It’s too early to have solid figures, but we already know that household budgets – which were already under strain – are going up because of people having to spend more on fuel. And often the first thing to get cut down, in terms of quality and quantity, is food. It’s the thing that shrinks to accommodate others essentials like fuel to get to work.
We have messages from the various food relief agencies who are saying that they're getting more and more people coming up to their services. In many ways, it’s beginning to mirror the pandemic. It’s why we’ve started to see some people hoarding food again – that survival instinct is kicking in. And you can’t really fault people for that because, unlike in many other countries, Australia’s government doesn’t have any structural systems in place to guarantee food security for its citizens in times of crisis.
"Ideally, we use these moments of crisis to innovate and make meaningful changes to a system that is only going to continue to break if it isn’t fixed.
What kinds of food security is in place in other countries?
In Australia, while we have certain safety nets like income support and Medicare, our safety nets regarding food are minimal. People on income support aren’t able to buy nourishing food as the current payments are too low. We don't have a ‘Right to Food’ in our legislation, which guarantees that governments have to ensure that all its citizens have the right to feed themselves.
In Sweden, for example, they’ve set up emergency grain reserves which the Swedish Board of Agriculture says can feed 90-95% of the population for three months in times of national emergency. Australia takes a much more individualistic response to food. Food is treated like a luxury, not a human right.
What kinds of responses are needed at a time like this?
The most meaningful emergency response that we saw to food insecurity during the pandemic was the government increasing welfare payments. We heard lots of stories of families at the time that were using that additional income to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. So while we definitely need to look at the food system, we also have to look at our other economic systems and our social welfare systems to actually meet the moment where it’s at. We need a collective response to food security that moves beyond each community member stocking up their pantry and panicking that they will run out of food.
And how do we shift the idea of food security as a collective issue?
In many other countries food is a common good. For example, it's just a given that school children are provided with a nutritious meal. Unlike in Japan, Korea and the UK, here, every child brings their own lunch to school, which builds a cultural mindset that it's up to the individual to feed themselves and puts pressure on families.
A lot of really great academics and experts are now calling for a national school meal program here in Australia, because that’s a significant lever we can pull to ensure food security. School lunches mean that every kid is having at least one nourishing meal a day. This has to be designed with school communities so it isn’t a top down response but works for that school, prioritising healthy, local food and joyful food experiences for children.
Tasmania is the only state that currently has a school meals program, which currently runs in about 60 schools. The Tasmanian Government has mandated that 75% of the ingredients for the school meals will come from within the state. And there’s a few schools in Victoria running similar programs with great results. Not only does this provide financial relief and food security, there’s been many studies that have shown that lunch programs increase attendance rates and behaviors improving.
Across the system we need to consider things like incentives for farmers to transition to more regenerative farming methods and be less reliant on diesel. Food procurement also plays a part: if the government can ensure our institutions like hospitals, aged care and early childhood facilities are sourcing nutritious food locally, this means that farmers who are growing food regeneratively have a stable market to sell their food into. And people in our institutions – older people, children, those who are ill – are supported with nourishing food; it really is a win-win for the health, environment and local economies.
Ideally, we use these moments of crisis to innovate and make meaningful changes to a system that is only going to continue to break if it isn’t fixed.
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