By Tammi Jonas

Australia does not have a food production problem. We have a problem of power in our food system. 

The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) recently shared a draft theory of change in their co-design workshops working towards a Feeding Australia Strategy. The draft includes a bunch of the feel-good buzzwords – equity, dignity, environmental sustainability – but as many of us in the social movements (farmers, activists, scholars, etc) have feared all along, there is clearly no commitment to changing who actually controls our food system. 

Those driving the DAFF process, coordinated by a large consultancy based in Australia’s capital cities, claim to put people at the centre, when the real centre is obviously profit. The theory of change isn’t a theory at all; it’s the economic system in which we have been living for centuries, notably sped up since the 1980s, to protect profitable producers, trade, and economic prosperity (but for whom, we ask?). It’s export ag with a human face peeking out from below, (not pictured: said people begging for clean water in Menindee Lakes, fresh food in Fitzroy, or access to local food in every capital city). Maybe I missed the recognition of First Peoples’ sovereignty, dispossession, or land justice?

Australia is a major agricultural exporter, yet millions of people struggle to access fresh, affordable, culturally appropriate food. Further, a food system cannot be called equitable while it depends on underpaid farm workers, exploited migrant labour (e.g., PALM Scheme labour investigations), and invisible reproductive labour to keep food cheap. Labour exploitation is one of the operating principles of a capitalist food system, which must be challenged from the outset of any food security strategy.

The nod to ‘diversity across scales’ is supposed to look inclusive, but a multinational processor and a small, mixed farm are not just different sizes, we are on opposite sides of a system that squeezes value from the many for the few. Calling this diversity erases the material conditions of extraction and exploitation. Who controls processing, logistics, retail, and price-setting matters more than how many times the government says ‘resilience.’ 

They really show their lack of systemic thinking when they pose ‘respond to changing climate’ as a systemic intervention, which is like saying ‘respond to being burnt’ instead of saying ‘stop lighting fires’. Climate change is treated as an external risk rather than a direct result of extractive, industrial agriculture and endless growth. We get ‘repair and sustain the natural ecology’ as if it’s compatible with business-as-usual export expansion. Real ecological repair requires us to draw a line against extractivism, not just tweak procurement policies (though obviously these are useful and can be important reforms on the path to transformation).

A real theory of change would start by acknowledging what needs to change: who owns what, who is indebted to whom, who controls the value chain, whose land was stolen, and who decides what’s grown and for whom. It would prioritise decommodifying land, food, and water; bringing land reform, debt justice, and cooperative infrastructure; breaking supermarket monopolies; and putting decision-making back in the hands of communities and First Peoples.

This map isn’t about changing the system – it’s about painting a ‘kinder, gentler nation’ (thanks, George Bush) while capital stays in charge, and Australia participates in the cause and suffers the consequences of imperialist wars and colonial capitalism (note systemic intervention #1 – manage national security risks – for the groundhog day effect). On that point, remind us how the proposed ‘systemic intervention’ to ‘strengthen international trade’ will better feed peoples in so-called Australia? Food security cannot be built on imperial supply chains, military alliances, and export dependence while calling that resilience. The challenge confronting fossil fuels and synthetic fertilisers dependent farmers with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates exactly how fragile and lacking in resilience our current food system is. But, we know what we need to do, and there are already farmers and First Peoples practising approaches to land and cultural resilience that we can leverage to support feeding Australia into the future.

And now, for a refreshing paragraph extracted from the Peoples’ Food Plan:

A simple set of framing questions has long been posed by La Vía Campesina to judge the health and fairness of food systems:

Who produced the food?

How?

For whom?

What do they do with the surplus?

Answering these questions is usually sufficient to enable people to appreciate the manufactured complexity of industrial supply chains, an imperative in realising everyone’s right to nutritious and culturally-determined food grown and distributed in ethical, ecologically-sound, and socially-just ways, and our right to democratically determine our own food and agriculture systems.

Food security without food sovereignty is just managed dependency. If the government is serious about resilience, it must be willing to confront concentrated ownership, colonial dispossession, and corporate power—not simply manage their consequences.