The government needs to look at how much of our agricultural land is going to foreign ownership. Also, why are our oranges left to rot on threes, while we import from Brazil?

Thanks Allan - great to hear some common sense on this issue. Much of the upbeat rehetoric we are hearing, that you mention, seems based on phsychological drivers rather than market analysis or review of what is happening in Australian agriculture. I'm no expert, and agriculture is not even my focus, but I sat through an ABARES Outlook Conference in WA last week and from the morning session could have been forgiven for thinking that the food boom to India, China and Asia was already upon us, and would supplant the mining boom. I got to mention in the afternoon the simple observation that a combination of continually declining terms of trade and climate change impacts already put over one-third of WA wheatbelt farmers into debt and equity levels where the banks would normally sell them up, but if they did land prices would drop so much 80-90% of the wheatbelt would be in the same position. While the horticulture sector may have some great opportunities for exports to northern countries (so why can I only find chinese garlic in most shops?) I'm of the view that broadacre high input production is already contracting and as a society we are ignoring the social costs involved. One-third of wheatbelt population leaves every decade. If there is aboom coming, those remote control tractors are going to be rich!

World population continuing to boom and guess what they need to eat.

Australian farmers are one of the most efficent growers in the world and guess what food production leads to a truly sustanable future for all of us.

So why are we going to pollute our ground water with fraking chemicals?
why are we risking our future for some dirty industry that will disappear in the next fifty years? especially if we can not feed ourselves!

Why indeed do we import foods that we can grow here. Greedy supermarket corportions are only part of the problem. "Free" trade agreements are another, because generally they are not multilaterally driven.All USA such agreements have caused immense damage to local producers, growers and manufacturers.
I do not believe that the cost of production here is the problem. Even in Africa imported American goods undersell locally grown products.
Without intending to promote parochial or nationalistic thinking, I do believe that Australians ought to consider what they will lose in tyhe long run if they dont make the effort to buy local and grow local.
Its not just our farmers who are being screwed. Its us.
And finally, why would anyone think that population growth is inevitable. All it takes is a bit of intelligence to work out that the planet cannot bear ever increasing populations of homo sapiens, and if we were truly homo SAPIENS we would realise that we do not need more and more and more.
Enough of everything is enough. Including human beings.
Australians ought to get onto their parliamentary representatives and get legislation passed that
(1) protects or farming land from being sold to overseas intersts- it is a matter of national security!
(2) reinstitute tarrifs on essential items that can be produced within Australia. To give our people jobs/ means o livelihood in the future.

Australia should become a food super power; food always grows and will continue to do so “basic fact” and so Australia should be the major exporter and grower of food. Government involvement and investments has to be made on this to continue the revenue it will generate for the life of it, as the minerals/resources will not last forever but food will!

This is an important conversation and the comments to date have been insightful. Today Australian agriculture is less important in national importance and the shortsigtness of this attitude is staggering. Our primary producers partly have themselves to blame for this attitudinal change. Other industries have changed and not cried poor when times were tough by seeking government assistance. Reference the footwear and clothing industries. (I immediately concede that the motor trade, coal, and the alumina industries are not beyond requesting assistance, mostly without performance measures.)
Nevertheless agriculture provides us with immediate security and is deserving of help in tough times, like droughts, so production knowledge is not lost.
Yes, we do need a local food industry but we need to measure the cost of exporting water in the form of meat and livestock off shore. And farmers need to be smarter so that they are not just price takers.
All this I suppose means our attitude to free trade is not sustainable for agriculture.

response to Bruce Waddell and others
It is appalling that our governments seem to place food security/food production/healthy environments at the bottom of their priority lists when it comes to putting in the investments needed to sustain them.
What i see is local, state and federal governments/agencies spruiking about "development" which seems more often to be involved in developing aspects of our lives which bring big profits for a few at the cost of the wellbeing of the many.
Have we really wanted to create a truly "me-generation" of citizns, along the American model where the individual is king and social health are deemed only an unfortunate imposition because of those who are losers.
I grew up in rural Australia. farming is hard work. Most farmers are not rich. They value their land and in the main do whatever they can- and what they are often advised or told to do- in order to grow us good quality food.
It is becoming harder for farming families to make a living wage. I do not believe that it is in our country's longterm interests to give mining companies priority over food growing. I know why they do. And it is not a question of being realistic.
Midas thought he had it made. But we cannot survive by eating gold. Or diamonds, or coal or iron ore.
And i do not mean that there should be no mining.
But what I do believe is that if we want our children and grandchildren to survive, and I for one do, then we had better start forcing our governments to start looking after our land, our rivers, and our farmers a damn sight better than what we are doing now.
Not all of us have farms.Not all of us are agricultural scientists. But all of us eat food.
So we need to work together.
Oh, by the way are there any more women out there who care about this as well as me?
I am a mother and a grandmother.
I do care about my grandchildrens future.
And I still try to grow my own vegetables as much as my health permits me to do. As long as I can.
And I buy as local as I can.

Yes, it is "time to wise up"!

In 2008 the world produced enough food for 12 billion people (UN/FAO figure). This was way too much food for the 6.7 billion global population at the time. So why were their food riots that gave rise to the Arab Spring? Why did 45 million children die of starvation that year? Why were 923 million people chronically malnourished as well? Why were there over 2 million food insecure people in Australia, arguably the richest nation on earth at this point in time? The answers to these symptoms all point to a meta system in crisis.

Professor Tim Benton (UK Champion for Global Food Security) stated that all the ministers and secretaries for food and agriculture he has met around the globe privately agree that "the food system is broken, but that it is politically untenable to fix it" - personal communication 11/5/2012.

The evidence of a dysfunctional system is all around us and yet we hear constant calls from politicians and 'authorities' for increased productivity and production. Do these well meaning authorities think food prices will rise as production increases in a world already awash with food? Will embattled environments and ecosystem services improve with increased production pressures? Do they really believe increasing production, yet again, will solve the problems this 'solution' has failed to solve in the past, like eliminating hunger or boosting farm incomes? If they believe all these things, where is their evidence to support their beliefs? Frankly there is no evidence for, and I can produce reams of empirical evidence against.

As Professor Allan Curtis correctly points out, Australian farmers will only benefit by targeting specific food niches in Asia where we have a comparative advantage. But as cost squeezed, fungible commodity producing price takers, these niches are soon targeted by lower cost producers. In externalising all other values and reducing food to a price based fungible commodity, Australian farmers will remain the living definition of an old business adage; "If you live by price, you die by price." And we have been witnessing the death of rural Australia for decades.

Doing more of the same repeatedly and expecting a different result is a clinical definition of insanity, yet this is what is being called for by "Australia’s PM, a shadow minister, and a state premier". The food meta system must be overhauled before simplistic linear reductionist 'solutions', like 'niche marketing' and 'productivity increases' are implemented, otherwise they will continue to do more harm than good.