Thu Mar 26

War fuel price shocks reveal the folly of a long food supply chain

Written by Kimberley Reis, Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering and Built Environment, Griffith University, Griffith University

Most of our food travels many thousands of kilometres across Australia to reach our kitchens. We are highly dependent on a vast web of long-haul trucks to move food ^[1] between growers, massive food distribution hubs and large supermarkets.

Of course, trucks need fuel – and lots of it. As war in the Middle East leads to diesel price spikes in Australia, food prices will rise too. Already, the National Farmers’ Federation has said ^[2] it expects food prices will rise “within weeks”.

And as the COVID pandemic showed – where supermarket shelves were emptied after widespread panic buying – it’s not just war that can reveal weaknesses ^[3] in a system too heavily reliant on available diesel and long supply chains. These problems are also laid bare when natural disasters strike, roads are cut off and trucks can’t get food to supermarkets.

Meanwhile, Australia’s current strategy of releasing fuel reserves ^[4] may only end up delaying food price hikes, as the war in the Middle East plays out in unknown ways.

This shock to our food system is not the first, and it won’t be the last.

Focusing on band-aid solutions that prop up the current system undermines our long-term capacities for resilience. We need a plan B for when plan A – the current system – isn’t working.

We need a place-based approach

A place-based approach to food systems asks the question: what could work for our own local (or regional) area?

This approach normalises access to locally or regionally grown food ^[5], and acknowledges that what works in one area might not work in another.

Access to shorter food supply chains can include things such as policies to promote:

smaller, regional produce processing and distribution hubs ^[6]
local abattoirs ^[7]
local canneries
cultivation and protection of regional food bowls, rather than building housing on them ^[8]
direct food sales from cooperatives
promoting school and home gardens.

Allowing people to participate in the system – or even co-produce food – helps build community resilience to economic shocks and access food beyond just supermarket shelves ^[9].

This could include things such as:

joining a community-supported agriculture group ^[10], in which a community of people pledge money to buy produce from a farm before it’s harvested and offers certainty to local farmers
buying what you can from farmer’s cooperatives and markets
participating in a community food garden
buying locally grown produce online, which has become easier in the wake of the pandemic
participating in fruit and veggie box collectives.

A place-based approach also means focusing on what’s in season in your region and acknowledging that this means you might not, for instance, be able to get mangoes in autumn in southern Victoria.

A woman buys fresh greens at a farmer's market.

Ask yourself: what’s my plan if I can’t get food from the supermarket? Sam Lion/Pexels ^[11]

Having a back-up plan

Governments need to encourage people to have a contingency for tough times, when the long supply chain supermarket system is disrupted.

For communities, this can mean asking yourself what’s your plan if you can’t get food from the supermarket. It might mean taking time to work out where the local suppliers are, what food is in season in your area, and how you can support local farming co-operatives.

Being able to access food reliably from local and regional places is common sense; it means we don’t have all our eggs in one basket ^[12].

For businesses, a more strategic approach to local procurement ^[13] – by preferencing the purchase of locally produced food – means your business can stay open when the food supply chain system is under pressure.

Governments need a plan to shorten food supply chains

Shorter food supply chains means ensuring people can get food within, for example, a 400-kilometre radius ^[14]. Federal, state and local governments have a role to play in finding policies to support this. This can include promoting and supporting ^[15] things such as:

farm gate sales and shops
pick-your-own produce on farm sites
community, school and home gardens, and
purchasing groups.

One example, which I was involved in, was a local farm ^[16] co-run by students with the Mini Farm Project ^[17], on school grounds at Loganlea State High School in Queensland. The students farmed food, donated food to local charities, and learned about self-sufficiency.

Governments obviously have a range of competing priorities. But smart policy-making ^[18] means embedding access to place-based food initiatives ^[19] across multiple policy areas, such as climate change, education, urban development and community-building projects.

A system that can withstand shocks

Sudden shocks – such as war, pandemics and severe weather events – reveal the folly of having a food supply chain so absolutely reliant on the price of crude oil.

A major part of our vulnerability to these shocks is our unquestioned and ongoing dependence on government to come in and prop up the system.

The federal government recently announced ^[20] it would undertake national assessment of Australia’s food supply chains, which will “focus on diesel supply chains, and will then expand to other critical agricultural inputs, including crop protection products and fertilisers”.

This is a start but it fails to solve the problems sustainably.

Place-based approaches to food systems offers opportunities to change the dynamics around how we relate to our food.