What do you do when the food sector gets together to tell the truth about the government’s failures? Fix the problems? No!
Pay them off. The Australian.
The food sector has united to accuse the Albanese government of failing to act on rising prices despite a growing number of working Australians going hungry, warning that customers are paying more at shopping centres and restaurants because of high energy prices, Labor’s workplace relations agenda and a lack of productivity-enhancing reforms.
On the same day industry bodies across the food supply chain told The Australian they would demand a pre-election commitment to create a food-security strategy, the Albanese government revealed it would take such a pledge to the election.
…The plan will include the creation of a National Food Council, with industry experts to advise the government of the implementation of the strategy designed to prevent food shortages seen during major supply chain disruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
…With industry leaders saying the issue has been urgent for two years but has fallen on deaf ears in the Albanese government, Agriculture Minister Julie Collins will on Tuesday unveil $3.5m of funding to create a “Feeding Australia” plan to “boost the security and supply-chain resilience of agriculture and food production systems in Australia”.
Why does it cost $3.5 million to create a plan for the government, whose job it is to create a plan?
Some of these costs are unavoidable. The UN food price index has never fully retraced following COVID and the Ukraine War.
There is hope for further falls if we get Ukraine peace, increased food supply, and cheaper energy, especially gas.
In the meantime, there is stuff the government could do to help. Most notably, kill the gas cartel.
Mr Forbes – whose members have complained about energy prices rising by more than 50% – said more consultation with the food sector on how to alleviate business costs would have limited food-price increases.
Brianna Casey, chief executive of Foodbank – a charity in overdrive supplying food to one million Australians a month – said food-relief organisations were also struggling with increased costs of doing business. “We are experiencing a quite significant surge in the cost of sourcing food, certainly huge increases in the cost of transporting logistics associated with moving food relief around the country,” Ms Casey said. “So our overheads, our power, our labour costs (are) escalating at a time when demand for food relief is also escalating.”
Ms Casey said she had never seen anything like the current demand for the charity in her nine years at Foodbank, with households earning more than $95,000 a year facing food insecurity.
Gas is a huge input into cropping food production prices via fertilisers.
It is also a key input into climate-controlled food production, such as fruit and veg, via rising electricity prices generally.
The key chemical input into fertiliser is urea derived from gas, which is also being pushed around by constant Chinese bans and unbans.
Australia imports about half of its fertiliser needs.
We should see further price relief in food prices as the global gas glut builds for the next few years.
But unless Australia tackles its gas cartel, we will continue to starve a lot more than we should.
