The NFF Horticulture Council has today launched its election platform, challenging the next Federal Government on its role in securing the nation's food supply as rising prices strain household budgets.
Entitled Feast or famine, the platform identifies a series of major challenges facing the national fruit, vegetable, nut, nursery and turf industries and in response puts forward practical actions for the next government to take that will set industry on a sustainable course. These actions include:
- Implementing a National Food Plan
- Securing a skilled and productive workforce
- Giving the ACCC stronger powers
- Fairer and sustainable funding for biosecurity
- Launch a campaign to boost Aussie fruit, veg & nut intake
Jolyon Burnett, chair of the Council, said global, national and regional events were raising public consciousness about the prospect of an insecure food future and that strategic and deliberate stewardship of the food system was required if Australia is to not just sandbag its ability to sustain itself, but help underpin the food security of our trading partners.
"Events like COVID-19, the war in Ukraine and ongoing tensions in our own region have brought home to the horticulture industry, as much as it has done Australian households, the fact that we sit at the end of long and at times tenuous supply chains, including for some of our most essential agricultural inputs," said Mr Burnett.
"For a long time, governments have been hands off, relying upon the ingenuity and ambition of our farmers to find new and better ways of leveraging Australia's endowment of natural resources.
"And we have had great success in this approach. Australia has one of the most efficient farming sectors anywhere in the world. But growers are carrying an enormous load on behalf of the Australian people and are now at risk of buckling under the weight.
"Growers carry a disproportionate burden for responding to pest and disease incursions, where it is the wider community creating the risk, and enjoying the benefits, from the increasing volume of goods imported into the country.
"Growers are paying higher wages and providing better conditions for workers from the Pacific and Timor Leste, because it's in the nation's strategic interest to create closer ties with our near neighbours.
"They lack access to the latest, safest and most effective agricultural chemicals, available to competing countries, because of government policies and programs that aren't doing enough to make the Australian market an attractive proposition for global chemical companies.
"Government regulation of our domestic markets has meant the cash we need to reinvest in new products and more efficient businesses has instead ended up in the hands of supermarket executives and shareholders.
"And we've not had the deliberate, meaningful investment required from government in public health campaigns to turn around troubling trends in the consumption of fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts.
"The Council is calling on the next Federal Government to throw off our laisse fair approach to food security and the provision of green space, and instead engage in careful, strategic stewardship.
"As a lead commitment, to bring all these threads together cohesively, we are recommending the development of a National Food Plan, to be implemented by a new Minister for Food or a special subcommittee of Cabinet to oversee its implementation.
For more detail, refer to the Council's election platform Feast or famine: a call to action to avoid future food insecurity.
