Submitted to the Feeding Australia Strategy Committee drafting team – Australian Government on 18th June 2026.
This submission to the Feeding Australia Strategy builds on the foundations of the original People’s Food Plan (2013), developed by the Agroecology & Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA, formerly the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance). The Plan was co-created through a nation-wide participatory process involving over 600 people and marked the beginning of a broad-based movement advancing a just and sustainable food system in Australia. Food sovereignty, which is everyone’s right to nutritious and culturally-appropriate food produced and distributed in ethical and ecologically-sound ways, and to democratically participate in food and agriculture systems underpins this submission.
The submission is further informed by contributions from AFSA members engaged in academic research across food sovereignty, agroecology, the right to food, public health, and political ecology, grounded in both action research and lived, community-based experience. It also reflects sustained international engagement with global movements and networks, including La Vía Campesina, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), Urgenci (the international network for community-supported agriculture), and the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM).
Colonial capitalism has devastated livelihoods, culture, biodiversity, soils, and the climate, and actively suppresses alternative visions for agriculture and food systems, especially those rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems. Under late-stage capitalism, the elite capitalist class has gained an astonishing level of control over food systems from production through to distribution, with strangleholds on everything from land ownership, dairy processing, and abattoirs to supermarkets. Control doesn’t stop with ownership, however, and is exerted so perniciously in our systems of governance that it severely limits democratic participation by First Peoples, smallholders and local communities in decision-making processes.
These concerns extend directly to the composition and processes surrounding the National Food Council under the Feeding Australia Strategy. The concentration of corporate and agribusiness interests within advisory and decision-making bodies raises serious questions about whose knowledge, priorities, and interests are being centred in shaping national food policy. Such dynamics risk privileging large-scale, industrial food system actors at the expense of small-scale producers, community-led initiatives, and the broader public interest.
This corporate capture is deeply concerning and ultimately detrimental to all Australians, as it undermines the development of a fair, resilient, and health-promoting food system rooted in food sovereignty and agroecology. Equally troubling is the lack of transparency around participation in the co-design workshops informing the National Food Security Strategy. There is currently no clear or publicly accessible information on how participants are selected, which stakeholders are included or excluded, or how diverse community voices, particularly those of First Peoples, small-scale farmers, and civil society, are being meaningfully represented.
In spite of these barriers to peoples’ involvement in growing, exchanging, cooking, and making decisions about the food we eat in Australia, there is a growing movement of farmers, First Peoples, allies and local communities fighting back with active optimism – an optimism born of being active in the changes we wish to see and be in the world. The food sovereignty movement is now over a decade old in Australia, and over 40 years old globally, and is working tirelessly to radically transform the food system from the ground up. Agroecology is central to the movement, a scientifically and experientially justified practice of agriculture that is sensitive to the ecosystems in which it is situated and that fosters the democratic participation of all peoples in the food system. Unlike the current state of the food system in Australia, agroecology actively asserts everyone’s right to participate in decision making, ensuring those most affected by changes in policy and practice have the most say in those changes. This submission advocates the principles and practices of agroecology as the solution to the devastating impacts of colonial capitalist food and agriculture systems. Those principles are described in the section on Agroecology, and they include: Recycling; Input reduction; Soil health; Animal health; Biodiversity; Synergy; Economic diversification; Co-creation of knowledge; Social values and diets; Fairness; and Connectivity.
This submission is organised into a series of thematic sections, each grounded in the principles of food sovereignty and agroecology, and each concluding with practical recommendations. It opens by putting First Peoples first, addressing self-determination, the return of Country, and the restoration of Indigenous food sovereignty. It then examines food governance and the concentration of decision-making power; the right to food and the case for a rights-based, legislated approach; land and water use and the planning reforms needed to support small-scale producers; and water as both a human right and a right of Nature. Further sections reframe biosecurity as a question of biodiversity, interrogate the corporate consolidation of the value chain, address food safety and the regulatory exclusion of First Peoples’ food knowledge, advocate for higher standards of animal welfare, and scrutinise the role of technology in either entrenching or challenging corporate control. The submission closes by presenting agroecology as the overarching solution, and the framework through which a just, resilient and democratic food system can be realised.
