MEDIA RELEASE: $100 BILLION IN EXPORTS, BUT WHO IS FEEDING AUSTRALIA?
***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — 16 March 2026***
The NFF and the Albanese Government are celebrating a much-anticipated milestone: Australian agricultural production is forecast to hit a record $101.4 billion in 2025–26, with exports projected to reach nearly $85 billion. The Agroecology and Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) asks the question the headline numbers don’t answer:
Who is this food system actually feeding?
Increasingly, not Australians.
Australia already exports around 70 per cent of what it produces. The entire architecture behind the $100 billion target — built on free trade, expanding exports, and ongoing consolidation — has been designed for overseas markets.
Australia’s domestic food system has been treated as an afterthought.
The Nous Group’s report Fragility to Resilience confirms what regional communities already know: the infrastructure connecting small and medium-scale farmers to local eaters is disappearing. In the past year alone, six abattoirs have closed their doors to local farmers across Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia.
Without abattoirs — the legal and logistical gateway to selling meat — small livestock farmers cannot operate. Independent butchers, unable to source whole carcasses locally, are pushed into dependence on large processing plants, many owned by multinationals.
This is not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of decades of deregulation and export-first policy that prioritises commodity value over people’s right to access food grown close to home.
Recent geopolitical tensions have exposed how fragile that model has become. The illegal war against Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting shipping and threatening fertiliser supplies that global agriculture depends on. Yet the agribusiness lobby has responded by calling for greater dependence on those same supply chains.
In its submission to the Federal Government’s Feeding Australia National Food Security Strategy, the NFF calls for guaranteed supplies of imported fossil fuels and nitrogen fertiliser. The Nationals have echoed the demand, citing the Hormuz closure as proof of Australia’s vulnerability.
But the fertiliser and fuel being demanded are not primarily used to grow food for Australians. They are used to produce export commodities — grain, canola, cotton, beef and lamb — shipped overseas.
Guaranteeing fossil fuel supplies for this model will not feed more Australians. It will deepen reliance on the global supply chains the current crisis has exposed as fragile.
AFSA says the real solution is rebuilding the domestic food infrastructure that allows Australians to feed ourselves — abattoirs, regional processors and local supply chains.
As the Federal Government develops its Feeding Australia National Food Security Strategy, AFSA is calling for a fundamental shift in priorities. A strategy that celebrates $85 billion in exports while ignoring the collapse of local food chains is not a food security strategy. It is an export promotion strategy under a different name.
The Alliance is urging governments to treat domestic food infrastructure as critical national security, enable micro-abattoirs and mobile slaughter units, and include clear targets for strengthening regional food systems and the viability of small and medium-scale farms.
It is also calling for food sovereignty — the right of people to shape how food is produced, processed and distributed — to be recognised as a pillar of national food security.
The farmers, butchers, processors and eaters who make up AFSA’s community are not asking for a seat at a table designed for multinationals. We are asking government to build a different table — one where success is measured by whether Australians can access nutritious food from farmers who can afford to stay on the land.
QUOTES
‘We harvest our vegetables by hand, raise and slaughter our animals, and sell food directly to people in our community who know exactly where it came from,’ said Dr Tammi Jonas, AFSA Focal Point for Farmers and farmer at Jonai Farms. ‘That food system is being dismantled by policy choices that treat farming as an export industry and Australian families as an afterthought.’
‘The NFF wants the Government to guarantee fossil fuels so multinational grain traders can keep exporting commodities. We want the Government to guarantee that Australians can still buy a carrot or a chop from a farmer they know. Those are very different priorities.’
‘We live and farm in relationship with Country, and we feed people here. But the strategy called Feeding Australia never asks the obvious question: feeding which Australians? Because right now the system feeds export profits and wealthy commodity traders far more reliably than it feeds the people who actually live here.’
‘If a $100 billion farm sector cannot guarantee Australians access to food grown in their own regions, that is not a success story. It is a system that has forgotten who it is supposed to feed.’
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MEDIA ENQUIRIES
Dr Tammi Jonas, Focal Point for Farmers
Agroecology and Food Sovereignty Alliance
0422 429 362
