US-Iran War Threatens Australia’s Food Supply: Delivery Crisis Looms

By Dr Martha Knox Haly  

There are many abhorrent aspects to the illegal US-Iran war. There is one very personal aspect that keeps me up at night. This is directly related to the fact that, as a human being, I need to keep eating. The fraught intersection between Australian agriculture, fuel, food security and minimal government support directly threatens my food security, and really everyone’s food security in this country going forward.

One of the lessons from the pandemic was that our food supply chains are resilient, provided that they don’t have to deal with simultaneous multiple crises. The food chain is precariously balanced across the availability of fertiliser, water, electricity, telecommunications, labour and fuel. Australian farmers are now not only dealing with a changing climate, increasing frequency of natural disasters, diminishing labour availability and predatory purchasing practices. They are now also facing a shortage of fuel and fertiliser.

It not just farmers who will be impacted. By 2022, food insecurity had become a middle-class problem in Australia. 2022 was the first year in which natural disasters were cited as a contributing factor to food insecurity. The Food Bank Hunger Report noted that natural disasters have been cited specifically as a contributing factor to food insecurity. The report made the sobering comment that previously the impact of natural disasters meant that food relief tended to peak in specific times of the year in response to natural disasters. By 2022, on any given day, 306 000 households were receiving food relief. The level of food insecurity rose to 32% in households with children, compared to a national average of 21% of households experiencing food insecurity.

The Food Bank (2022) evaluation found that 21% of Australian households (two million households) suffered from extreme food insecurity – meaning that due to financial limitations, these households were spending entire days without food. This was caused by cost-of-living pressures, climate crisis and income crises. Households with children were even more likely to experience severe food insecurity, were 1.5 times greater than the national average to experience severe food insecurity. In 64% of food insecure households, the cost of food and groceries, followed by energy, housing costs and reduced government benefits were cited as the main causes. This was despite more than half of food-insecure households having a household member in paid work, and a third of food-insecure households having a mortgage. Food insecurity had indeed become a middle-class problem.

By 2025, it got worse, the number of Australian households experiencing some form of food insecurity rose to 44% of all Australian households, whether this be a concern that food would run out, compromising meal choices or spending entire days without food. This equates to a whopping 3.5 million Australians having experienced food insecurity in the last twelve months. As Food Bank grimly noted, food insecurity has now become an entrenched reality, super charged by the housing crisis. Rural and remote regions are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity because of the cost of fuel for long distance food transport. Now thanks to this war, fuel is about to become both more expensive and scarce. I fear for the survival of these communities which depend on food relief and long distance delivery.

Responding to what will be a bigger crisis in food production, means tackling the pre-existing problems. In 2022, Australia rated 22nd on the Global Food Security Index. In 2018, Australia was the 6th most food secure country. Our diminishing food security standing was associated with the absence of a national Food Security plan, droughts, mass fire events, and disastrous decisions around the marketisation of water (but more about that later). Indeed the Federal Government is not planning to finalise the National Food Security Strategy until mid-2027 (at the moment they are ‘co-designing’). All I can say is that we are a bit screwed if the war doesn’t stop well before the National Food Strategy comes out.

At the moment, most of our food, like our gas, is exported offshore. This is against a context of farming in a country with one of the lowest levels of support for farmers in the OECD (approximately 2.7% of gross farm receipts in 2022-2024). What subsidies do exist, favour large export oriented agribusinesses. Contrast this with Norway, where support equates to 83% of farm gate prices, Switzerland (60% of dairy farm income comes from government subsidies) or Japan (producer support by the government is an estimated 32% of gross farm receipts). Norway ranked 3rd in the world for food security, Japan ranked 6th place and Switzerland held 11th place. Despite Australia producing more food, it is well behind these countries in terms of food security.

In all three of the high subsidy countries, farmers are provided with strong support for the adoption of emissions reduction and sustainable technologies. For example aging Japanese farmers are being taught to maintain and utilise robot technology for cropping work, and growing climate adapted crops. This includes shifting to an agricultural sector that runs on renewable energy.

Australian farmers rate well in terms of adaptability, and investment in research and development, they make do very well with what they have. They fare poorly in terms of more expensive items around farm infrastructure, remaining heavily dependent on diesel and human labour, because farmers lack the government support to make this transition. An often-cited stumbling block for reducing Australian agricultural reliance on diesel, is the difficulty in electrifying heavy farm equipment such combine harvesters and trucks. However there are examples such as Leaderbrand in New Zealand, which has recently started using a battery operated harvester. The Australian startup company LINTASS and French company Terafield have developed fully electrified combine harvesters. Now would be a good time for our Government to strongly support an Australian startup like LINTASS or ACE (an Australian EV manufacturer for small vans and utility vehicles). At this point, I need to plead with our Prime Minister: ‘Albo please for love of god please don’t rip another opportunity away from Australian manufacturing and technology again like you did with the Federal Government AI platform’.

The Tesla Semi and Windrose electric semi-trailers are already being deployed in North Africa, and trialled in the United States. The State of California provides a handsome subsidy of 90% of the sticker-price for purchase of electric semi-trailers by private operators. The Australian Federal Government and NSW Government provide a range of incentives, around purchase, fringe benefits tax exemption, interest rate exemptions and finance packages from the Clean Energy Corporation. According to the Australian Trucking Association, electric semi-trailers and EVs generally, the subsidies need to be around 50% of the purchase price for electric vehicles, trucks and equipment across the Australian transport sector. Current NSW incentives are well below this level. Higher vehicle purchase subsidies need to be done in the framework of dramatically increasing government support for smaller and medium-size food producers of drought resistant crops. I don’t care if farmers are not traditional Labor supporters, we all need to eat, farmers feed us, and to do this they need electrified transportation yesterday.

Climate change is already badly affecting the Australian agricultural sector, increasing episodes of drought. The Australian Crop (AC) Report of December 2025 noted that drier climates had started to limit crop production in regions of South Eastern Australia, with yields in NSW being down by 10% on a year-on-year basis. Horticulture Innovation Australia observed 40% of horticulture growers are in the southern Murray-Darling Basin. Production in the South Eastern Murray-Darling basin is still increasing, which means a greater proportion of Australia’s fruit and vegetables will be exposed to the risk of drought. The AC report predicted a shift from rice and cotton, to growing drought tolerant crops such as sorghum, chickpeas, lentils, lavender, saffron and growing yams and aerial potatoes as climate resilient alternatives to traditional starch potatoes.

The question lingers – this phenomenon purely driven by climate change and will growing drought resistant crops be enough? In my article on ‘where did the water go’, I spoke about how two independent scientific studies revealed that too much water was still being extracted from the Murray Darling. In further research ANU researcher Professor Grafton and his team identified that water extractions in the Northern Basin bore greater responsibility for deteriorating riverine health than meteorological drying trends. The largest irrigated crop in the Murray-Darling Basin is cotton, which was associated with 35% of all water extraction. I should note, when last I checked cotton is inedible, and hemp provides a more durable high performance, less water thirsty alternative textile.

While data for 2024-2025 is limited, but ABS figures indicated that in the 2020-2021 year, the amount of irrigated hectares for cotton jumped by 260%, and cereal crops increased by 102%, compared with just a 14% increase for fruit and nut irrigation. This is being driven by higher prices for cotton, and the Australian cotton export industry being worth $2.7 billion annually.

It is also being driven by a small number of water holders and cotton growers. In a 2019 technical review for the Natural Resources Commission, Griffith University Professor Fran Sheldon found that 10 of 158 license holders were responsible for 86% of extracted water, and that just 4 license holders controlled 75% of extractions. There is no government regulation around what crops irrigators grow, and no regulation around water storage and certainly no prohibition around building enormous dams which will deprive down stream communities of water. A particularly devastating development is the right to extract flood plain water, which downstream producers rely on.

In December 2023, Bloomberg Green identified two cotton and irrigation agribusinesses, which were huge beneficiaries of flood plain extraction licenses: Australian Food & Fibre (AFF) (privately owned by Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board since 2021) and the Harris Family. AFF was granted licenses to intercept 14% or 39 gigaliters of flood plain extractions. The Harris Family was prosecuted in 2015 for excess water extraction, and yet they still hold 12% of water extraction licenses for around 12% of all licensed flood plain water extraction in the Northern Basin. Their properties have a capacity to store 50,000 gigaliters, and Peter and Jane Harris were suing the State’s Water Minister for an even larger allocation. Unbelievably when there is insufficient flood-waters, growers are allowed to accrue their allocations for five years. This means after a four-year drought, the Harris Family is entitled to extract an incredible 48.5 gigaliters of water in a single year. Peter and Jane Harris’s companies have been repeatedly fined for excess water extraction and illegal storage construction. Like the Australian gas cartel, the industry association for wealthy irrigators, has produced a series of expensive ads opining about the contribution of the cotton industry to Australia.

The Bloomberg Green article explained that the development of the water market is what enables Australia to export 70% of its agricultural produce. The wildly lucrative export market would never be possible without marketising Australian water, unfortunately the marketisation of water has meant the end of many small producers who service the domestic food market. The Bloomberg article described the associated destruction of dairy farming businesses, Indigenous communities and riverine ecology caused by the cotton growers’ excessive extraction in heart-breaking detail.

NSW and Queensland are moving to tighten the regulation of flood plain licensing, but the state of riverine health suggests that flood plain extraction licenses need to be completely bought back and phased out. The Federal Government should voluntarily acquire the AFF and Harris Family holdings, and other mass water extracting irrigation properties.

One of the key pressures on farmers (and Australian families) is the crushing market power of Australlia’s supermarket duopoly. Where ruthlessly low prices can be imposed on producers, and price manipulation can be imposed on customers. In considering solutions to this, I am indebted to the brilliant work of Leah Galvin in her submission to the enquiry into food security. Galvin has spent decades researching and working on food systems and food security projects. In her view, the solution to breaking the duopoly power of supermarkets is to leverage the procurement power of hospitals, universities, schools, TAFEs and prisons. Sustain: the Australian Food Network has also been calling for Federal and State Governments to mandate nutritional levels and quotas for direct public and private procurement from local producers. These strategies create an expectation that children, tertiary students, patients, detainees, residents and public sector staff can be provided with adequately nutritious meals, whilst supporting local producers. It provides an instutional counterbalance to the supermarkets.

This is about deliberately inculcating the values of social support and setting a price which guarantees producers a decent standard of living, rather than pursuing more neoliberal ‘clap trap’ where procurement is about greedily getting the most produce for the lowest price. Another strategy is to support the creation of farmers’ markets in regional areas with populations of 2000 or more people, with government subsidising producers transport costs and providing locations for farmers markets.

Another factor that results in food insecurity in rural and remote Australia is the cost of fuel and transport. In the present circumstances, rural and remote Australia, particularly Indigenous communities are now facing a food delivery catastrophe. So there is an urgent need to find alternatives to road freight. Solar powered drone delivery of food is common in China, and the company Zipline in Nigeria has transitioned food and medical deliveries to drones and solar power, renewably fuelling thousands of deliveries. Both China and African countries have developed sophisticated mobile solar-powered refrigeration solutions for drone delivery. The Australian Government is also backing a long range solar powered drone project called the Pegasus program. This program could be upscaled to provide mass food deliveries to rural and remote Australia with a stipulation that food delivery prioritises good quality, nutritious food.

The available evidence points to the fact that food insecurity cannot be blamed on climate change or resolved through drought resistant crops. We need whollistic solutions for food insecurity beyond the current crisis.

Let’s bring it home with discussion of a national food guarantee, ensuring that every person in Australia has access to nutritious food. Consider this in Australia, Victoria is facing a shortage of gas because most of our gas is exported overseas, and we do not have an east coast gas reserve. This is largely due to the prioritisation of gas export contracts. When the irrigators sucked the Murray Darling dry during the 2018-2019 drought, south eastern food producers were denied water despite the Murray Irrigation Limited allegedly holding huge reserves. In 1915, during World War One, Australian citizens experienced food shortages, because Australia’s produce, after a drought in 1914, was prioritised for the British war effort. Right now 70% of our food is exported. As food productivity diminishes there will be political pressure on our government to prioritise the continuity of those export contracts over feeding the Australian population. The historical trend in gas and water management, suggests that we will be left to experience food shortages before those contracts are allowed to be curtailed. My proposal in legislation mandating enough food to allow each adult at least 3000 calories a day from the age of 12, and up to 2200 calories a day for children. This will involve the creation of a national domestic food reserve providing free food, making it a condition of farm subsidies that a portion of produce is reserved for domestic consumption.

Following on from Leah Galvin’s recommendations for a model farm, the National Food Guarantee can also involve using the properties acquired from the Harris Family and Australian Food and Fibre to model production and food distribution networks. Food packages could consist of a free vegetable, dairy and protein package delivered on a weekly basis to every Australian household who wants to register for the scheme. Storage and delivery to remote areas can be achieved through drone fleets. Drones can carry back food waste on the return journey to create compost and fertiliser. This is a massive, but essential undertaking which will require creative technical solutions for food storage, nutritional optimisation. It will need constant review and AI based modelling to ensure everyone is being fed, nutritional standards are being met, and that food waste is being efficiently repurposed. The AI model supporting the National Food Guarantee will need to be checked each month to correct for drift because this is a new undertaking. It is a huge, difficult, but necessary task. We must have a legislative and institutional framework that prioritises feeding Australians over export contracts. Now it is up the Australian public to demand this, because it is unlikely to be initiated by our Government.

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