AFSA's Submission to the Inquiry into Productivity in Australia

Submitted to the Senate Select Committee on Productivity in Australia
Australian Government on 19 February 2026.

The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the Inquiry into Productivity in Australia. AFSA is a farmer- and First Peoples-led organisation representing small-scale food producers and allies working for socially just, ecologically sustainable, and economically resilient food systems.

From a food sovereignty perspective, Australia’s productivity challenge is not a failure to intensify production, but a failure to build resilient, equitable, and regenerative systems capable of sustaining livelihoods, ecosystems, and communities over the long term. Conventional productivity strategies—centred on scale, export growth, and corporate concentration—have delivered short-term gains while eroding farmer viability, regional economies, biodiversity, food security, and climate health.

This submission argues that many dominant policy responses to productivity—market-based environmental mechanisms, technological solutionism, and further consolidation—are false solutions. They fail to address structural drivers of declining productivity, including ecological degradation, supply-chain fragility, market power imbalances, and the hollowing-out of regional Australia.

AFSA advances agroecology as a proven pathway to productivity understood in its full economic, social, and ecological sense. As defined by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, agroecology integrates ecological principles with social equity, farmer autonomy, and territorial governance across the entire food system. It delivers productivity gains through reduced input dependency, improved climate resilience, enhanced biodiversity, regional employment, and improved public health outcomes.

The COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating climate impacts, and biodiversity collapse have exposed the fragility of globalised, centralised, export-oriented food systems. These shocks demonstrate that resilience and productivity are inseparable, and that localisation, diversity, and democratic governance are essential productivity assets, not inefficiencies.

Current policy framings of “resilience” often focus on restoring supply chains to pre-crisis conditions. AFSA contends that this approach misunderstands the problem: Australia’s food system has been in crisis for decades. Returning to the status quo will further entrench social inequality, ecological decline, and economic vulnerability.

This submission therefore calls on the Australian Government to:

Reframe productivity to account for long-term ecological integrity, First Peoples’ self-determination, farmer livelihoods, regional development, and public health;
Address conflicts of interest and market concentration that undermine genuine productivity;
Redirect public investment toward agroecology, regional food infrastructure, and farmer-led innovation;
Balance immediate, incremental reforms with the transformational change required to secure food security and economic resilience under climate volatility.

If Australia is to achieve sustained productivity growth, it must move beyond extractive, export-driven models and invest in food systems that regenerate rather than deplete, and that distribute value more fairly across society and generations.