Permaculture’s big context…
Food security becomes national security: former defence chiefs
A report about the likely impacts of climate change on food security complements earlier scenario paper on Australia’s liquid fuel vulnerabilities…
Note: I use the term ‘food security/insecurity’ in this article as defined by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation: food insecurity exists whenever the availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or the ability to acquire acceptable food in socially acceptable ways, is limited or uncertain. This is sometimes confused with food sovereignty, which is about control of the food system and the right to choose the types of food you eat.
What happened?
It gives me a weird sense of deja vu to read that the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group is positioning global heating as a critical food security as well as a national security issue. I’ve been saying that ever since I was one of four who started the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance over a decade ago.
The Issue Report is the first time former Australian military leaders have taken up the call for climate action at this level. The chapters of Issue Report 2022—Food Fight: climate change, food crisis & regional security summarise their argument: The climate-food-security nexus; Prevent-Prepare-Protect; Ukraine and food security; Drought & water stress in a hotter world; Crops yield to the heat; Act now to mitigate the looming food & security crisis. The report makes recommendations (download link below).
As well as retired army, naval and air force leaders, the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group includes Cheryl Durrant, a former director of preparedness and mobilisation at the Australian Department of Defence. A few years ago Durrant was associated with an assessment of Australia’s liquid fuels situation. In revealing significant vulnerabilities that could bring the nation to a standstill and spark civil unrest, the findings of that assessment do not make for comfortable reading.
How does the Issue Report see the present situation?
Anyone familiar with military planning will recognise that the Issue Report’s authors have applied five-point thinking in their analysis and recommendations:
- Intelligence—understand what is there, the situation, its environment and its threat to regional food supply, political stability and national security
- Clear intent—what is the main things we are trying to achieve?
- Appropriate means—do we have the means to achieve the main things or can we acquire them?
- Clear plan of action—can we develop an unambiguous action plan for dealing with global heating and its likely food crisis that incorporates the legislature, industry, economic measures and international cooperation?
- Withdrawal strategy—this is interpreted as achieving our clear intent of reducing carbon emissions, ensuring an adequate food supply for our region and reducing the national security risk to countries in the region, including Australia.
What does the Issue Report recommend?
We should read the report’s situation analysis and recommendations in the light of initiatives taken or forecast by the new Labor government after its election on 21 May 2022. Much of the situation analysis remains relevant.
What do the climate leaders say about our present situation?
- Australia is ill-prepared for the security implications of climate-change-enhanced global food crises and their systemic, cascading risks to human and global security
- Australia has no credible climate policy, leaving our nation unprepared for increasingly harsh climate impacts
- it is already too hot and climate change is already dangerous
- capacity to assess national and regional vulnerabilities, and understand the consequences, is inadequate; understanding and assessing climate–security risks in general is an urgent task for the Australian Government
- it is time to act with clarity and urgency.
How do the climate leaders propose we change our situation?
The report says that the first duty of government is the safety and protection of the people, but Australia has failed when it comes to climate change threats.
Recommended actions include:
- climate change should be a primary focus of both economics and politics in Australia, with clear commitments to mobilise the resources necessary to address this “clear and present danger”
- the goal of net zero emissions by 2050 is wholly inadequate; that point must be reached as close to 2030 as possible
- fossil fuel emissions must be reduced to zero at emergency speed.
What do the climate leaders recommend?
The climate leaders report covers the intelligence, clear intent and appropriate means elements of the five-point planning methodology. It carries a sense of urgency that would be viewed positively by climate change adaption and amelioration advocates. It recommends that the Australian government:
- develop a Climate-Security Action Plan
- implement a whole-of-nation Climate and Security Risk Assessment—an urgent review should be undertaken of Australia’s food production and supply chain resilience in a hotter climate
- establish an Office of Climate Threat Intelligence as the foundation for a “Prevent. Prepare. Protect.” climate action security plan (this is where I found the parallel between the proposed office and the ministry in cli-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent book, Ministry for the Future)
- build an Australian National Prevention and Resilience Framework with coherent processes across critical areas including energy and water, logistics, health, industry and agriculture, research and environment
- Australia should contribute to deploying a monitoring system to identify potential food insecurity hotspots, and commit to a programme to enhance food production capacity and resilience in the region
- mobilise all the resources necessary to reach zero emissions as fast as possible; cooperate to develop the global capacity to prevent irreversible tipping points and drawdown greenhouse gases back to safer conditions in the long term; Australia should assist and enhance the capacity of neighbours to withstand climate-change-driven food shocks and their security consequences
- to mitigate the risks, Australia should commit to strong emission reductions and, as a high per-capita emitter, aim to achieve zero emissions as close to 2030 as possible
- protect the most vulnerable communities, nations and ecological systems.
Shortly after its election in May this year, PM Anthony Albanese’s Labor government announced its intention to instruct Australia’s most senior intelligence chief, Andrew Shearer, to head a review of the security threats posed by the climate crisis. We wait to see what comes of this. It would be useful if the review were to consider food security along with national security among the threats, and to make recommendations. Were they compatible, the recommendations could add impetus to those of the Security Leaders Climate Group to stimulate action.
The recommendation to develop an Australian National Prevention and Resilience Framework highlights a systems thinking approach by the climate leaders group, as it seeks to integrate the separate elements of the national economy that all-too-often are treated in isolation rather than as interacting components of mutual influence.
Global heating “a clear and present danger”
The report goes on to highlight:
- Australia and the Asia-Pacific are a “disaster alley” for climate change
- governments in Canberra have not properly planned for the impact of “cascading and compound events”
- Australia should adopt an accelerated path to net zero emissions while also pushing for greater global ambition to tackle the climate crisis
- a 2ºC warming may see south-east Asia’s crop production decline by one-third per capita by 2040
- former Australian defence force chief Chris Barrie said a rapidly heating planet “fundamentally threatens our ability to secure our food and water supplies… it is clear that a lack of food — driven by war, climate change or a combination of both — can destabilise and lead to even more conflict”
- Neil Greet, a former colonel in the Australian army, said Australia needed to prepare for “big consequences” from climate change; these would include disruptions to Australia’s own food growing systems
- food scarcity has already become a contributing factor to major conflicts around the world, including the Syrian civil war
- food insecurity in the region would “drive political instability, conflict, and people displacement in ways that will significantly impact on Australia and the security of its people
- failure to address the root causes of climate warming will result in great pressure on the Australian defence force and emergency and disaster relief agencies to pick up the pieces in the face of accelerating climate impacts.
In a quoted paragraph in the Australian Security Policy Institute’s The Strategist, Australian Army capability chief Brigadier Ian Langford was quoted as confirming that the military regards global heating as a national security threat:
“Langford noted that while the army had to prepare for such contingencies, its wide range of duties included responding at home to pandemics and disasters such as fires and floods flowing from climate change — a demand we can expect to increase over time, especially within our region,” reports the author of the article, Brendan Nicholson. The article was about lessons for the Australian military being drawn from the Russian war in Ukraine.
The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group Issues Report is a call for preparedness in the face of a changing climate. Coming from an institution familiar with disaster situations and trained to deal with them, the comments are not only timely but demonstrate the natural immunity the military has to infection by politicalised, tabloid media and social agents of disinformation active in climate change denial.
Why does it matter?
The report matters because food insecurity would impact Australians as well as our neighbours in the wider Asia-Pacific. It reports that extreme weather events and unpredictable impacts on food production will lead to more price and supply volatility.
Were a warming climate to affect Australian farm productivity through drought, flooding, increased pest populations and increased incidence of plant disease and other impacts, any resulting shortages would force up prices and perhaps see the reintroduction of purchase limits of foods and goods such as we saw supermarkets introduce during the pandemic—rationing, in other words. We have caught a smaller-scale glimpse of how a scarcity of food and goods triggered by weather events and disruption to the supply chain acts through the supply/demand mechanism to boost price rises for everyday foods, as well as rationing:
- Cyclone Yasi’s destruction of the Queensland banana crop in 2011 that destroyed an estimated 75 percent of the crop, valued at around AU$350 million, and about 20 percent of the sugar crop, and that led to a shortage until supply increased over following crops; in 2006, Cyclone Larry brought similar damage
- the mid-2022 price rise for iceberg lettuce to around $10 a head in some supermarkets was due to crop loss during this year’s extreme rainfall and flooding in eastern Australia
- in early 2022 supermarket shelves emptied as heavy rains disrupted both the east–west and north–south railway and road networks
- the impact of the pandemic on national food supply chains through large-scale absenteeism in production and transportation industries that brought shortages and empty supermarket shelves; as a consequence, flour, pasta and other foods were rationed by the supermarkets, with limited quantities available per customer
- at the time of writing, staff shortages due to absenteeism attributable to Covid 19 infection in the manufacturing and transportation sectors continue to reduce the availability of some foods and non-food goods to bring delays in their delivery.
Both personal and public health could be impacted. It is a vicious cascade. Climate impacts such as drought or flooding cause a shortfall in grain and other food production. Falling supply acts through capitalism’s demand/supply/price mechanism to trigger increases in food prices. Grain is traded on the global market at prices set by that market, so it flows to nations with greater financial reserves, nations that can afford to pay the higher price. Global demand exceeding supply would increase international competition for food commodities such as grains and cooking oils, push up prices for imported foods and deprive lesser-developed nations and their peoples of affordable, basic foods.
Now, one of two things happen. Perhaps both happen simultaneously. Basic foods like grains become unaffordable to people of limited financial reserves and human nutrition goes into decline. Personal wealth becomes the arbiter of who has food. Where government or international emergency food relief is insufficient or unavailable, social unrest arises. In states with unstable political systems this grows into internal conflict that threatens to destabilise governments. States fail.
An alternative scenario sees the social unrest due to food shortages trigger refugee flows into wealthier and politically more-stable nations. This stimulates fear for their own food supply and other resources and the destabilisation of their way of life. Anti-refugee sentiment and support for anti-immigration political parties grows. Unless contained, this has potential to threaten political stability in host countries.
These scenarios should be familiar by now. They illustrate how global heating’s agricultural impact has the potential to affect the entire political economy of even financially-better-off nations and their people.
How vulnerable are Australian households?
How vulnerable are Australian households to a food crisis induced by climate-related or other events? Consider these realities:
- there is typically less than 30 days supply of non-perishable food in the supply chain at any one time
- there is typically less than five days supply of perishable food in the supply chain at any one time
- Australia is a geographically distant island whose imports and liquid fuel supply chains are precarious and susceptible to disruption by conflict, unavailability of shipping and countries hoarding supplies for their domestic use in a climate or other crisis
- households generally hold only about a 3–5 day supply of food in the home
- such low reserves are vulnerable to natural disasters and disruption to transport from extreme weather (Climate Council); extreme weather events and unpredictable impacts on food production will lead to more price and supply volatility
- 4–13% of the Australian population are food insecure, and 22–32% of the Indigenous population, depending on location (Bowden, M. 2020, Understanding food security in Australia, CFCA Paper No 55, Australian Institute of Family Studies, Southbank Vic).
The 2022 IPCC impacts report discloses other possible climate-change-induced threats that could disrupt agriculture and food supply:
- geographic variability in impact, but mostly negative for agriculture
- higher temperatures and increases in the intensity and frequency of hot days and heatwaves
- increased evaporation due to higher temperatures
- more intense bushfires
- a reduction in broadacre livestock production in southern Australia with livestock carrying capacity decreasing across the northern rangelands
- shorter growing season for cool season crops
- changed pest and disease regimes
- loss of pollinators from a combination of toxins in the environment, climate disruption, and changing land use practices
- higher level of photosynthesis and plant growth due to the CO2 ‘fertilisation effect’
- reduced fish stocks
- rainfall — mean rainfall will continue to decrease in the southwest; changes over northern and eastern Australia remain uncertain
- increase in severity of droughts and the time spent in extreme drought conditions in southern Australia; a shift towards drier conditions across southwest and southeast Australia
- heat stress reduces milk yield by 10–25% and up to 40% in extreme heatwave conditions; the yields of many important crop species such as wheat, rice and maize are reduced at temperatures more than 30°C
- by 2050, climate change is projected to halve the irrigated agricultural output of the Murray-Darling Basin region, which currently accounts for 50% of Australia’s irrigated agricultural output by value (about $7.2 billion per year).
A sudden food insecurity crisis coming from abrupt political or economic events in our region or beyond would present Australians with significant challenges, as would similar events coming from a cut-off or reduction in the liquid fuel supply that is critical (especially diesel fuel) to the transportation of food and other goods. There would be a time gap and possible chaos before government, industry and the public could respond by installing local replacement systems or coping measures. Less-abrupt changes stemming from the agricultural or distributional impacts of a warming climate might give us time to respond, however that would have to be an emergency response with all the government intervention it would require.
“The food security problem is made worse by current food systems which have contributed to environmental degradation and inequitable food distribution, overconsumption of foods in general (especially energy-dense nutrient-poor foods) and food waste”—Food Fight, climate change, food crisis & regional security.
Driving the issue
A short digression
Let me briefly digress into fiction.
As I read the group’s proposals my mind leapt to a book and to something that could be a precedent.
The book. It is speculative fiction/cli-fi (climate change fiction) writer and permaculture advocate Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novel, The Ministry for the Future. The book describes the doings of the people and a UN agency set up to advocate for future generations in a world beset by an increasingly hot climate and for ways to ameliorate the worst of the heating. It is an inspiring book with innovative solutions. The Security Leaders Climate Group were not recommending a global agency to cool our changing climate, however their proposal to establish an Office of Climate Threat Intelligence and to develop an Australian National Prevention and Resilience Framework were reminiscent of the approach in Kim Stanley Robinson’s book.
The precedent. We have to step back into the 1980s for this, a time when the Minister for Science in the Hawke government was the polymath and science advocate, Barry Jones. It was in that role that he supported Australia’s science and research agency, the CSIRO, and set up something innovative for government — the Commission for the Future. Established in January 1985, the Commission adopted a future-focus that included sustainable development, the development of an information-economy society, biotechnology, global warming, population, trends in the labour market, international affairs and technology. The Commission closed in 1998. Barry Jones was an early advocate for action on climate change, in 1984 advocating to his cabinet colleagues to take action.
Barry Jones put down his ideas in his book, Sleepers, Wake!, an assessment of the future impact of the information and technological revolution then underway. His latest book, What is to be Done? Political Engagement and Saving the Planet revisits the challenges Australia and the world faces.
Can we look to the Commission for the Future as inspiration for the Security Leaders Climate Group’s proposals for federal initiatives on climate change? The commission was much-criticised by the knockers in our society whose prime skill was criticism rather than constructive action, and, sure, it appeared at a time when environmental issues were only starting to be seen as worthy of federal attention, however its came at a critical juncture of technology and society. It was only a decade earlier that the Australian economy had started on its road to technological transformation through computerisation. In the eighties, that technological transformation was gaining momentum. It ever there was a time to think deeply about our technological future, it was the time of the Commission when that future was opening up. Now, in a world beset by a changing climate when the science championed by Barry Jones is being called upon to provide solutions, the Commission offers a valuable precedent to the proposals of the Security Leaders Climate Group.
A consequence of serial failure
The Australian Security Leaders group’s report highlights a serial failure in federal policy regarding our changing climate. An increase in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent of 4.1m tonnes of carbon dioxide during the previous federal government’s final year in office is evidence of this.
The report is timely in linking food insecurity to global heating and the potential for conflict, and in emphasising the risks it brings to both human nutrition and political stability. Evidence for its relevance at this time comes through Russia’s war in Ukraine which is increasing global food insecurity with its weaponisation (and reported theft) of Ukraine’s wheat harvest.
The danger of simultaneous failure
Drought and flood, agricultural disruption, food shortages, hunger, social unrest—these would be the simultaneous failures brought by a heating climate that cascade into a food and national security crisis. Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Upside of Down, warned of the risk of simultaneous failure some years ago. Simultaneous failures in social/ecological/economic systems, he wrote, are much harder to deal with than a failure in one single part of a system.
Homer-Dixon’s was a systems thinking appreciation of the challenges we face. It reflected the reality known in systems dynamics — change one part of a system and expect changes in other parts of the system to follow. The Food Fight issue paper comes to the same conclusion: “As with the physical world of climate change, disruption in one part of the system can cascade to produce a domino effect across the system as a whole, producing systemic risks.”
Cascading disruptions are those that do not remain with their immediate cause but flow on into other parts of a system. The content of the Food Fight issues paper reinforces what Homer-Dixon wrote about simultaneous failure — in this instance, the cascading failure of the climate system into farming systems and through shortfalls in food supply into reduced food affordability, civil unrest and refugee flows that have potential to trigger social unrest in politically stable refugee host states.
The issues paper cites an example of how cascading, simultaneous failures compounded into social and political failure in recent times in the Middle East: “… concurrent climate-related wheat harvest failures in Ukraine, Russia and China were an important driver of The Arab Spring.” The paper names Syria, where civil war currently rages, as an example.
Failure to understand how complexity works will lead to an underestimation of the threat, says the Australian Security Policy Institute’s Dr Robert Glasser: “Most analyses of climate impacts treat climate hazards as independent variables rather than considering the wider context in which they interact with each other and with human systems. For example, a study of the impact that rising temperatures will have on agricultural productivity will overlook the compounding impacts of other hazards (flooding, drought, fires, increases of pests, saltwater inundation, cyclones, migrations of people, and so on), which will be occurring simultaneously.”
Politicising what is an issue supported by scientific evidence and requiring scientific as well as political, economic and popular intervention are some governments and their politicians, some industries and an assortment of climate change disinformationists. All that these have succeeded in doing is delaying responses to our heating climate, confusing people, sowing discord in society, discrediting science and increasing the food security and associated risks of a warming climate (more on disinformation and its tactics here).
The Russian war and its impact
As I write, global bodies are assessing the potential impacts of Russia’s war in Ukraine on that country’s export wheat crop.
Russia continues to block the export of the Ukrainian wheat crop by mining the shipping lanes out of Ukraine along which wheat is transported. Talks to allow shipment of the grain are in progress but show no sign of success at this time. The situation could change over coming weeks, however going by Russia’s stubborn intransigence in their war, we shouldn’t hold our breath. Russia is also accused of stealing some of the Ukrainian wheat harvest to sell to countries not complying with sanctions and still maintaining economic relations with the rogue state.
Russia‘s wheat blackmail is a food security threat to those countries reliant on the export crop, mainly northern African and Middle Eastern nations. Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Morocco were to each import over a million tonnes of Ukrainian wheat this summer, according to UK food systems academic, Hana Trollman, Lecturer in Food Industry Management, Nottingham Trent University. In effect, Russia is holding them hostage to enforce its invasion of Ukraine.
Writing in The Conversation, Hana Trollman summarises the situation. “Ukraine alone produces a whopping 6% of all food calories traded in the international market. At least it used to, before it was invaded by the world’s largest nuclear power. Russia, meanwhile, is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, providing more than 17% of all wheat sold across national borders. At least it used to, before it was struck with some of the most severe international sanctions ever inflicted. Ukraine produced about 80 MMT (millions of metric tonnes) of grain, a category that includes wheat, corn and barley in 2021 and is expected to harvest less than half of that this year.”
The impact of the war on the planting of next season’s crop by Ukraine’s farmers is unknown. Time will tell.
Hana Trollman goes on to say that total world production of cereals is about 2200 MMT a year, which is “quite a bit more than is needed to feed the caloric needs of every person on Earth.” But, not all that grain — including more than half the quantity grown in Ukraine last year — ends up in the stomachs of people. Much of it goes into the stomachs of farm animals and enters the human food supply chain as meats, dairy and other animal products. The rest of it goes to the production of essential resources like cooking oils and biofuel.
Our World in Data reports that “Ukraine has been one of the world’s largest contributors to the World Food Programme–the UN agency that provides food aid to countries in crisis. The Head of the WFP, David Beasley, estimates that it provides 40% of its wheat.”
What can we do?
This is really a double question:
- The shorter term question is about what we can do to ensure a continuing supply of wheat and sunflower oil (a major Ukrainian export) during the Russian invasion.
- The longer term question is about the Australian peoples’ food supply and farming industry in a time of a warming climate.
Let’s look at the first question by asking another question: Doesn’t Australia produce its own wheat? Wouldn’t our domestic crop provide security of supply during Russia’s war on Ukraine or in some global food security crisis stemming from climate change?
The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group Issue Report and the wheat export crisis created by the Russian war on Ukraine highlight the vulnerabilities of the global food supply chain. Those vulnerabilities were revealed during the pandemic of 2021–22 when supermarkets rationed purchases of certain foods and other goods (remember the toilet paper crisis of 2021?), including flour and pasta, a wheat derivative.
The federal Department of Agriculture and Water Resources itemises domestic grain production and what happens to it. Annually, Australian farms produce in excess of:
- 20 million tonnes of wheat
- 2.5 million tonnes of pulses (chickpeas, lentils, peas etc)
- 4.9 million tonnes of oilseeds (canola and cotton seed)
- 8 million tonnes of barley.
This is far in excess of domestic consumption. Over 70 percent of grain, pulses and oilseed is exported, mostly to Asia and the Middle East. Export is crucial to large scale industrial farming. The downside is relevant to our second question. It is that, along with the carbon emissions entailed in farming, export adds to agriculture’s carbon footprint.
Australia produces around six percent of the global wheat crop. It imports none from Ukraine, however because wheat is a globally traded food commodity sold at prevailing global prices, those prices influence domestic retail prices in Australian supermarkets for wheat and derivatives like flour, pasta and breakfast cereals. While Australian farmers might profit from increasing global wheat prices brought by the Russian blockade of Ukraine’s wheat exports, Australian eaters could end up paying increasing prices for flour, bread, cereal and other wheat-derived products. Affordability, we know, is a big factor in the food security and nutritional health of Australian families.
These figures suggest Australia could be self-sufficient in wheat and other grains as well as perhaps in cooking oils such as sunflower and canola. Certainly, we have both the production and the grain storage capacity to weather a global crisis. The Australian Grains Research and Development Corporation says that there is sufficient grain storage available to cater for “a range of seasonal outcomes. There is about 55 MMT of bulk handling storage capacity at 623 sites across Australia. Combined with an estimated 15 MMT of on-farm storage capacity, Australia has capacity to store the equivalent of two years’ average grain production.”
The longer term question
A Farmers for Climate Action report earlier this year warned that “empty supermarket shelves will become a more frequent sight for Australians as the climate crisis heightens the risk of food shortages after extreme weather events”.
That is our second question about the longer term consequences for the Australian peoples’ food supply and our farming industry in a time of a warming climate. It comes with a lot of unknowns and much speculation.
We know a heating climate will impact global agriculture thorough drought, floods, the spread of increased pest and plant diseases and, perhaps, by the inability of food plant species to adapt to rapid climatic warming in regard to pollination, germination and heat stress. With the possibility of natural processes of adaptation in plants being exceeded and overwhelmed by climatic warming, whether genetic engineering could accelerate species adaptation and maintain the production of essential crops remains unknown.
Any lesson from history?
Does the global food crisis of 2007–2010 hold any lessons for us were the impact of climate change to be as severe as some predict?
That crisis was the result of simultaneous threats brought by drought and oil price rises. Oil fuels are a critical resource for industrial scale agriculture as well as for smaller scale farming systems. Simultaneous crises are more difficult to fix than single crises because of their interactions and because a remedy for one could be a problem for others.
The flow-on effect of the oil price rise was an increase in the price of other agricultural resources such as fertiliser and food transportation. These exacerbated food prices as did futures trading that boosted demand in the global wheat market. At the same time, grains continued to flow to biofuel production that benefited from government subsidies in the EU and US. National food stockpiles were already depleted because participation in the global food market discouraged national self-reliance through setting aside food in case of need. It was an example how, in a system, a change to one part results in subsequent changes elsewhere in the system.
The food security crisis brought economic and political instability and social unrest in both less-developed and more-developed countries. There were demonstrations and riots in some North and West African nations as well as in parts of Asia and Southeast Asia. Some nations stopped grain exports so as to bolster domestic supply.
How would we cope?
Australia’s food production and storage capacity suggests we could maintain a high level of food security in staple foods were climate change to impact the food supply system, assuming agriculture was not substantially disrupted. There may be enough productive capacity to supply nations in our region that could struggle. Much would depend on the scope of government intervention in the food market.
What potential for DIY food security?
Encouragement of small scale and home food production could boost supply to households, perhaps in a government supported scheme as was Australia’s World War Two Gardens for Victory campaign. This would work primarily for vegetables, domestic poultry and honey, assuming a warming climate does not bring a growth in bird-spread contagious poultry disease and similar infestations in bee hives affecting commercial and domestic honey producers (the verona mite infestation in eastern Australia in July 2022 provides us with a sample of the impact of contagious diseases).
Home-scale food production would offer only a limited solution because, unlike the times of the Gardens for Victory campaign, a growing portion of the population do not live in homes with gardens and because home gardens are too small for staple grain production at scale. There are root crops that could substitute for grains, however the land area available for upscaled production and processing is also relevant here. Household production would not provide a nutritionally complete diet unless cropping space and gardener knowledge and skill were present.
Other than home food gardens, what about community gardens, the shared places where people come together to grow food? Could they play a role in public health and nutrition in a climate-induced food crisis?
My long-term involvement with community gardens inside of local government and beyond suggests that they have potential as a household food-lifeboat strategy, however the size of the allotments in community gardens is generally too small to support a family in anything other than a limited supply of seasonal vegetables and grain such as corn. Community gardens are too few and often too distant from where people live to become major household food production nodes in our cities unless government makes land available for their multiplication. They could, however, become sites for food exchanges where people swap their excess foods both from within and outside the community garden, although care would need be taken not to overload gardeners with responsibilities other than their own food production.
When I became a consultant to local government and an adviser to new community garden startups in the 1990s, part of my motivation was establishing a cadre of trained, experienced community gardeners who in a crisis could go out to assist new community gardeners who were just getting started. I still think this a valid strategy for community gardeners, and it could be assisted by local government.
Government initiative required in a climate/food crisis
Food would have to be imported to town and city for those lacking a home or nearby community garden, and it is here that government has a role in ensuring urban fringe market gardening, orcharding and poultry production takes priority over suburban expansion.
Supporting the case for government encouragement of domestic food production is the experience of the Covid pandemic that provides evidence that Australians, who frequently take a cynical approach to government, are more cooperative with government initiatives that demonstrate they are for the common good in a crisis.
On to autarky
The Security Leaders Climate Group’s report might be interpreted to suggest that autarky is the best course for Australia to follow. Among other needs, this would include an assessment of the potential for:
- food self-provision; Russia’s imperialist adventure in Ukraine and its potential food security implications provide the needed evidence for the value of food self-reliance; the analogy of China invading Taiwan, which it has promised to do if Taiwan does not voluntarily submit to Beijing's control, which is improbable, would probably disrupt global markets of all kinds, including food; these political developments are potential shorter-term impacts on food security beyond climatic warming
- medical and public health self-reliance; the evidence supporting this comes from shortfalls in the availability of personal protective equipment for medical staff and in having little vaccine production research and productive capacity during the Covid 19 pandemic
- energy self-reliance; this is more-difficult as Australia’s Bass Strait oilfields passed peak production capacity around 2005-2006 and now account for around 17–19 percent of Australia’s oil and 42 percent of LPG production; a Sydney Morning Herald article of 2008 reported the NRMA Motoring-funded Jamison Group’s report, A Roadmap for Alternative Fuels in Australia, as claiming that oil production had peaked; Australia is a net importer of liquid fuels that are critical to the transportation of food and other goods, a vulnerability highlighted in the aforementioned more-recent report by the NRMA and Department of Defence; a move to energy self-reliance would necessitate increased investment in renewable energy systems, an assessment of the potential for geothermal energy and government support for the electrification of Australia’s vehicle fleet and rail network.
I omit water, another critical resource, from this list because we do not import it and have the technical capacity to harvest, store and manage its use.
What now for the report?
The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group’s report demonstrates two trends that have been building:
- global heating is a national security as well as a food security issue
- the military are part of our response to a heating climate and its impacts, whether in its conventional defence role of national security or in civil defence and emergency service provision as the military provided during the 2020 East Coast bushfires.
That the report comes from a military source is fitting as it is the body charged with responding to a range of crisis situations. It has the analytical capacity and the physical organisation and resources needed for an effective response in collaboration with civilian organisations.
The report and similar warnings over recent years are arguments against reliance on imported staple foods, although not for a cessation of all imports, and an argument for greater autarky in basic human needs. Food joins water, energy and public healthcare as the critical, basic resources for national self-reliance and wellbeing. This is not an argument for ceasing imports and exports, just for ensuring we have stockpiles of basic needs onshore and the productive capacity to sustain their supply.
What can we do?
What can we do? Let’s start with what the federal government is doing. In contrast to the sluggishness, responsibility-dodging and lack of motivation of the previous government, the new Labor government appears to be prepared to take action. PM Anthony Albanese is to instruct Andrew Shearer, Australia’s senior intelligence chief, to head a review of the security threats posed by the climate crisis (link below). Former Australian defence force chief, retired Admiral Chris Barrie, supported the move. He warned the government to plan for climate risks including disruptions to trade, more severe drought, and increasing demands on emergency services and the military.
Time will tell what comes of the government’s moves. Meanwhile, we can act regionally and politically by advocating for climate change adaptation and amelioration strategies at all levels of government and in industry, and act locally in cooperation with others in setting up our own systems for local self-reliance and food security at the household and community level. Adapting to a warming climate and its potential effects on our food supply is a job for the people as much as it is for government, business and our institutions.
This article licenced under CCAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Here are links mentioned above:
- DOWNLOAD (pdf): Food fight — climate change, food crises and regional instability
- Australia ‘ill-prepared’ for food insecurity driven by war and climate crisis, former defence leaders say
- Anthony Albanese to order intelligence chief to examine security threats posed by climate crisis
- ‘A clean slate’: new agriculture minister sees climate action as Labor’s chance to connect with the bush
- A review of the NRMA/Department of Defence scenario—What happens of the oil stops running?
- Farmers’ report warns climate crisis puts Australia’s food supply at increasing risk
- Australia’s emissions climbed in Coalition’s final year as transport and fossil fuels wiped out gains during Covid
- Bread and conflict in Ukraine
- Prospects for Australian wheat exports amid the Ukraine-Russia conflict
- Our world in data
- Hana Trollman, Lecturer in Food Industry Management, Nottingham Trent University, writing in The Conversation
- Australian Grains Research and Development Corporation—Australia’s bulk grain storage capacity
- 2007–2008 world food price crisis
- Australian Army capability chief Brigadier Ian Langford in The Strategist
- The Upside of Down — catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilisation; 2006, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Random House Canada. ISBN 978–0–676–97722–6.
Rather than head for catastrophe, by understanding the underlying principles that make human and natural systems resilient, and by working together to put those principles into effect, we can limit the severity of collapse and foster regeneration, innovation, and renewal. - Sleepers, Wake! Technology and the Future of Work; 1982, Barry Jones; Oxford University Press.
- What Is To Be Done. Political Engagement and Saving the Planet; 2020, Barry Jones; Scribe, Melbourne. Aidio report ABC Radio—Phillip Adams on Late Night Live: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/barry-jones---what-is-to-be-done/12852072
- The Ministry for the Future; 2020, Kim Stanley Robinson; Orbit, USA. ISBN 0316300136.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel of a global UN advocacy to ameliorate the worst of a heating climate by advocating for the world’s future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. - 470; 2020, Linda Woodrow; Melliodora Publishing, Hepburn. ISBN (print) 9780 6483 44247. ISBN (digital edition) 9780 6483 44254.
How people in Northern NSW, Australia, cope with the weather and social impacts of a changing climate. Includes ideas from permaculture.
More on permaculture in a changing world
