Transcript

What are the biggest contemporary threats to food security? How do global shocks affect supply chains? 

How will the Trump tariffs impact Australian and global food security? 

How can Australian research help bolster food security in other regions?    

In this episode, Alison Bentley and Dirk van der Kley join David Andrews to share insights into the current state of food security, contemporary threats, and the need for research and innovation to ensure sustainable food systems. 

(This transcript is AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies.)

Dirk van der Kley

Xi Jinping hosted a big symposium for business leaders and everyone was talking about Jack Ma from, you know, Alibaba and elsewhere. But in the front row was a fertilizer company, a seed company and a biotechnology company.

Alison Bentley

We currently have a gap in regulation and governance of this whole class of biological agents, biological solutions for agriculture.

National Security Podcast

You're listening to the National Security Podcast, the show that brings you expert analysis, insights and opinion on the national security challenges facing Australia and the Indo-Pacific, produced by the ANU National Security College.

David Andrews

Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm David Andrews, Senior Manager for Policy and Engagement at the ANU National Security College. Today's podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, and I pay my respects to their elders past and present. This week, I'm joined by Dr. Alison Bentley and Dr. Dirk van der Kley for a discussion on food security, a critical component of national and international security. To briefly introduce our guests, Alison Bentley is Deputy Director, Agriculture and Food at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and until very recently was group leader in plant sciences in the research school of biology and deputy director of the agri-food innovation Institute at the ANU. Dirk van der Kley is a Research Fellow here at NSC who specializes on technology competition and innovation between the US and China and is the head of the genes and geopolitics program at NSC. Welcome Alison and Dirk.

Dirk van der Kley

Thank you.

Alison Bentley

Thank you.

David Andrews

To start with quite a fundamental question. What do we actually mean when we say food security? Is there a common agreed definition? Does it cover a wide range of considerations? Alison, perhaps if I could start with you.

Alison Bentley

Yeah, I'm not sure if there's a fully agreed and accepted definition, but when I use food security, I use it to express that people have access to safe and affordable food, and that to me represents food security. And I think the two aspects of that is availability, so they're able to access food, but also the affordability aspect. And for me, that's a really having worked in international development, that's a really important framing of food security.

David Andrews

Dirk, how does that track with you? Would you add some extra components in there?

Dirk van der Kley

I think the definition is right. The availability and affordability is correct. I might add a couple of things just for framing for the listeners. Once we talk about food, we also talk about whether you're meeting sort of your energy requirements. So are you meeting your daily energy requirements? And if you go and read food reports and you talk about undernourishment, it usually means that you're not able to meet those requirements, whether it be for availability reasons or for, you know, economic reasons, but there's also a second component, which is a higher bar, which is can you meet all your nutritional and nutritional requirements, vitamins, things like that. It's harder to measure. Uh, but so often you see when people talk about hunger or food insecurity, those two parts of it get a little bit mixed up and you need to be clear as to whether you're talking about people are getting enough energy or whether they're getting enough full nutrition across the entirety of their diet.

David Andrews

So I think if we were to sort of maybe put a few broad headings, we're talking about the availability of food at one level, also talking about the accessibility of food for individuals and societies. I guess the ability to have stable supplies of that and to maybe utilize it to the sort of support of societies. that a sort of fair way of thinking about the issue.

Dirk van der Kley

I think so.

Alison Bentley

Yes, I think so. I think to Dirk's point that the work that I do on staple cereals is really about the baseline, providing a very secure baseline. And then the things above that that we can do to enhance food security come into play and are also really important as we transition, economies transition and food supply and availability and affordability change over time.

David Andrews

I think maybe thinking about the Australian context. Obviously we are big food producers. think most of our listeners would know that sort of it's been a for over a century of federation, that's been a key part of the Australian economy. But of course we've also got a huge continent to move that food around. And so it's not just about how much we produce in terms of volume, but it's getting it around the country and out of the country as well. So I think when we're talking about food security, we're also thinking of those, I guess, inputs to production of food. whether that's chemicals, fertilizers, fuel, all that sort of thing, which aren't necessarily the biological parts of it, but they are parts of, guess, the supply chain of food security.

Now that we understand what we're talking about, what would you think of as being the principle or some of the biggest contemporary threats to food security. Whether that's in Australian context or internationally. Dirk, maybe if I could start with you.

Dirk van der Kley

Happy to start on this one. And I think there's sort of two components we want to look at. So first, let's talk about how much food we're making, because that's the raw input that you have. And there's somewhat of a tension globally. So we're actually producing more food than we've ever produced. That's at a total level and at a per capita level. So if you go and read the UN food, agricultural reports, and at every year it'll say like, this has been a record year for XYZ crop.

And then the total value of food that we're producing and what Alison said before, the per capita calorie output of food that we're producing is actually going up. Climate change hasn't slowed it. We've basically been able to meet those challenges in a way. Yet whilst our total food production per capita is increasing, the amount of undernourishment in the world is also going up. And so we actually have a real tension here that doesn't, you wouldn't expect, you'd expect as food production goes up.

 

The amount of undernourishment goes down and that's been since about 2014. Prior to 2014, for the 60 years before that, we saw undernourishment, which is not enough energy, and the amount of people who could afford a full healthy diet above the baseline actually drop. And it dropped to about 500 million in 2014. And from the last, what are we 10 years past that, 11 years past that, it's steadily been rising. So we're sort of at about 750 to 800 million people now who cannot even get their basic energy requirements met.

So globally, we're actually at a point where the amount of food insecurity is going up, yet the amount of food we're producing is increasing. It's a real conundrum. And I think there's probably a few reasons for that. So the first is just war. There's more war than there has been for a long time. And it turns out when you're in war zones, you do struggle to eat. There's a second component to that, of course, is that when you have places like the Ukraine or Russia, which are big producers of fertilizer, it can create shocks in the system. The second component is climate change. Even though I said we're making more food than ever, we're seeing localized places where people aren't able to access the food. So, okay, yes, we produce more food, food overall, that in localized places, the physical access isn't there because of local disruptions to food supply caused by climate change. The third component is that we are seeing a move towards higher value food products. the staples, whilst they're increasing, you're seeing a lot of effort going into meat and other things as well. And so we're seeing a move up the value chain as, as, as the world gets richer. And so with these things that have happened, it's actually a real tension there. And to your question, well, what are the inputs? It's fertilizers number one, two, three, and four, like fertilizer. If we didn't have it.

If fertilizer supplies were to stop globally, we'd be at a point where, know, half the world would probably starve. that's the sort of key one. And you see when fertilizer supplies change for whatever reason, food production in that local area goes down quickly. all the other stuff matters, but that's probably the one that is over and above everything else that we have.

Alison Bentley

Yeah, and just to build on that, think most of my research has been focused on nitrogen fertilizer and how crops can, our staple cereal crops, how we can address that real underlying necessity to provide nitrogen fertilizer, which isn't available everywhere. In some places it's over applied, in some places it's under applied with this localized effects on the amount of food you can produce, the quality of that food, and therefore the food security impacts of that kind of ricochet outwards from there. And here in Australia, most of the grain, I work on wheat, most of the wheat is exported outside Australia, really key export from Australian agriculture. And most of the nitrogen that drives that production and that export is also brought into Australia. So you have this kind of interesting dynamic where we're bringing in the fertilizer to produce the grain, which we then export. So we're essentially importing something to export it out again. And that does create price pressures even in Australia with really efficient, effective cereal production that you have.

Anything that affects the price of nitrogen fertilizer will have knock-on effects to farmers in terms of how they can produce this export commodity. And then the customer of that export commodity, wherever they be in the world reliant on that, will also see those effects. And I think that's the reality. can look at the mean data of how much food we're producing as a world, but we know it doesn't work like that. We just don't divide all our food equally and distribute it to everyone in this kind of perfect scenario. It's not how it works. And really, we do see those gaps emerging. I think that's where, whether it's exacerbated by war, conflict, extreme climate events as well.

And I think that's another thing that we're seeing is climate shocks or perturbations, which really impact productivity to a level that impacts productivity very significantly in that season. So a flood which wipes out an entire season of production, very difficult to kind of mitigate that impact on the local food system.

David Andrews

This maybe isn't a perfect analogy, it reminds me, it struck me as an example of the nature of the global economy and the way that everything is so reliant upon sort of just-in-time manufacturing and shipping that whether it's fertilizer inputs or sort of other things we're importing to then produce the food to export it again, like we saw with COVID and as we mentioned sort of with shocks from Ukraine and elsewhere, that you sort of stop one point in the system and there are these massive flow-in effects.

So I lived in the Middle East for four years in Jordan and Kuwait and Jordan is much poorer, but does have natural water supplies. Kuwait is much richer, but doesn't. And even when I was living in Kuwait, you'd see people, you'd have crops being shipped from Jordan to Kuwait, for example. So it's these sort of different inputs and economic structures that I think are such a fascinating part of the conversation. But there's obviously great innovations that we've made in Australia in terms of I guess, cereal crops particularly over time and those exports which we see that now are fueling, feeding these parts of the world that are in great numbers, but as an island continent, we're still so vulnerable to those supply shocks.

Dirk, I understand you've written a little bit recently around thinking of fertilizer that some countries, maybe principally China, are looking to kind of get themselves out of this cycle of the global supply chain in a way by stockpiling these resources. Is that something that we're seeing more widely or is that a China specific approach caught up in other geoeconomic political factors?

Dirk van der Kley

Well, how I'd sort of characterize it is we were actually seeing fertilizer geo-economics. So we were actually seeing tensions around fertilizer supplies in a way that we haven't really seen before with global supply chains. So China has mostly now stopped exporting fertilizers around the world, particularly nitrogen fertilizers. It's the largest producer, I think, of nitrogen fertilizer.

You see a similar thing starting to happen in India as well, where they're looking to block export of fertilizer to try and, you know, increase access for local farmers, because local farmers in India generally can't pay the same price premiums elsewhere. So what happens when you have a shock? Most of the fertilizer flows to countries that can pay the most. So those two are doing it. And those two, of course, the most populous countries on earth and have huge agricultural outputs, even though per capita it's lower than Australia, they actually produce a lot of food. You see it there. What we're also seeing beyond that is industrial policy for fertilizer. So a country like Australia, we're now actually supporting fertilizer construction of fertilizer plants through government intervention in Western Australia. You're seeing that in Europe. You're seeing it in a number of countries in Asia Pacific as well. And so it's one of these sort of very hidden components is that everyone's spending a huge amount of money, probably subsidizing fertilizer, both at the producer level and also at the consumer level. in Indonesia, you're seeing a lot of subsidies for actual farmers going towards that. Now that leads to a few things. It actually creates less efficient production of nitrogen because you tend to not be, you don't have to worry about global competition. And so you tend to make it at a price point that's not as cheap as it was. Two, it's incredibly damaging environmentally because the production of nitrogen fertilizer creates a lot of CO2 and actually the whole agricultural supply chain is the fastest increasing part of CO2 emissions globally. So faster than anything else, while a lot of other things are sort of reaching their limits, agricultural CO2 emissions are just continuing to climb without any limitations. So what you're seeing here is three things, more pollution, less efficient production, even though it's subsidized. And then, know, just general tensions about where fertilizer can go if China has an excess, normally what would have happened previously is that would then be sold on the open market. That's not happening in the same way as it was before.

David Andrews

Alison, you were speaking before about the sort of regionalized localized impacts of climate change and food insecurity. I was wondering, guess, sort of grounded the Pacific and how that relates to sort of food insecurity in the Pacific with the change of sea levels and sort of sort salinity levels within soil and how that affects traditional farming and crop production. Is that something that Australia is tying into your development backwards as well, think about mindful of and taking steps to address and support?

Alison Bentley

Yes, I think there are several initiatives and efforts underway to really understand the scale and the kind of future view of that level of insecurity and then obviously to develop solutions around that. And there's a lot in there, right? There's how do you conserve traditional ways of producing food? But also I think an interesting question in the Pacific is as populations change, people's preferences change also, a growing reliance on foods that are imported and are not necessarily reflecting this full food basket that Dirk talked about earlier as well. And really, guess, whose role it is to really make those decisions as people have more income, they have more choice in what they buy, what's available, and who's really responsible for shaping that system and then what the externalities of that are as well as what the internal pressures are with growing climate threats. And I think that's very real in the Pacific. You have these very visible impacts of sea level changes, for example, or the incursion of salt into agricultural productive land.

And then you also have the disaster response capacity as well because climate extremes becoming more and more increasing in frequency places more pressure on some of those production systems. Bananas, tree crops in particular can be wiped out and then you have to really have a strategy for replacing that going forward.

Dirk van der Kley

Can I jump in on that? think one of the things that we don't talk about, particularly with Papua New Guinea, but it probably applies to some other parts of the Pacific as well, is that there is sort of a little bit of a silent food crisis going on there. And the data is really hard to find on Papua New Guinea because Papua New Guinea doesn't even know what its actual population is really, because it hasn't done a census in a long time. And so you get estimates of anywhere between sort of 10 to 17 million.

That's a fair data error and the same can kind of probably apply to food as well. But if you look at people who go and study these things, they think, you know, stunting in PNG could be as high as 40 or 50%, which indicates that those children are not getting their basic needs, but we're not even talking about the full basket here. That's pretty shocking that, you know, somewhere near half the population of the young population might not be getting their full energy intake. That is a genuine crisis and It has, out of all the things that might happen in your youth, it probably has the basically the highest impact on your life. It means, you know, on your height, your physical wellbeing and your mental capacity, it has long-term effects on that. So it's one of the things that we actually, in most of the discussions that happen around the Pacific, we actually don't talk about it that much. But it is a real crisis to what's happening there.

Now it's easy to identify that that's happening. Actually fixing the problem is a lot, lot, lot more difficult. Getting fertilizer to people in small remote communities that have very, very small amounts of, know, farmland, who are greatly affected by climate change. Those people really struggle to get like the physical access to goods imported. tends to be very expensive. And if you can get them there, the price point, becomes a problem. So I don't have an easy solution there. And, Australia does talk about this, but it is, you know, one of the most damaging things, at least for Papua New Guinea, that they face that we sort of don't speak about publicly at all.

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David Andrews

Dirk, I might stick with you for this one. And out of respect for Alison's government employment, I will not be directing this question to her. One thing that I think all of our listeners will be conscious of are the tariffs that the Trump administration has brought in on a number of its sort of key allies and partners. And there's currently talk around agricultural tariffs in Australia, particularly around beef and lamb import quotas and things.

How much of an impact would that have both on Australia's food security, but if we think of it as maybe indicative of a wider trend that seemingly the Trump administration is pursuing, what impact would that have on global food security if that undermines free trade agreements and things like that that underpin this economic model of food that we've been talking about so far?

Dirk van der Kley

In some ways, the global question is actually easy to answer than the Australian question. The global answer is that the Trump administration across a number of things, not just tariffs going into the U S but basically the dismantling of the USAID system, means that food insecurity and undernourishment not meeting your basic needs, it's going to increase. The people who are the most vulnerable in the world, USAID has been one of the things that has helped keep them nourished. It hasn't always meant that the agricultural system has improved, but that will mean that the 800 million people that I, and 800 million is a lot of people, that number's going to go up. I think that that's almost unavoidable under the route that they're going. The second component is I think we are going to see more protectionism and we'd seen this in slightly different ways before. So in the last 10 to 15 years, China – one of its biggest sources of agricultural inputs is it has actually been the U.S. and they've steadily been moving away from that, one through formal tariffs or two through encouraging their producers to buy from Brazil or elsewhere or actually to develop domestically. So that's fine. That's well and good. And that makes sense for China's food security. But it means the free flow of food just gets that little bit inhibited and we have a little bit less efficiency in the system.

And we're going to see that happen the other way with the US, those that sell into the US. This is a prime market for them and it allows them to recoup that and invest elsewhere. So what will probably start to happen is the US will provide more of its own food, but of course that gets exported elsewhere around the world. The stuff that they don't sell in there. And I think we're going to see tariffs going up in a number of places. We've already seen China raise agricultural tariffs against the US just in the last few months.

So I think that we'll see greater increased hunger around the world because of a range of things they're doing. That's the, it's the easy, but not satisfying answer. The tougher answer is for Australia. think we might actually be okay. Now that the, the one component is you say, well, certain producers are going to, you know, their livelihoods are going to be at risk, but, the things that we sell probably can find markets elsewhere in a lot of cases. And that's what happened when China, you know, targeted Bali – they targeted meat, we were able to find other markets, lobsters and wine were the two exceptions to that. But those two are not fundamentally vital for most food security. They're sort of add-ons that you can have at the end. And so what I think we will find other markets, but there'll be some pain points along the way for those that are exporting to the US market, which is a premium market. You then have to try and find elsewhere and market it differently. And those individual producers will probably lose out. But I think we will broadly be able to ride that storm at a macro level with a lot of micro perturbations along the way.

David Andrew

One thing that I think they've, sorry, that the US has raised recently in the context of this, what you might, I guess, categorize as like non-tariff measures of restriction around say, food safety, biosecurity measures that are restricting the import of their beef into Australia. Now, we can probably remove this from the US context and think about that in general terms of, Australia has a very strict biosecurity regime.

Does that materially have any difference on our food security outcomes or is that largely just around particular things –  an individual source of a product we could import. Well, we won't import it from country X because of biosecurity considerations, but we can still get it from Y. Does it really change our food security that much or is it a, just an input?

Dirk van der Kley

I think it does. I think it actually improves it in a way. We have the advantage and disadvantage of being an island. And that means that certain diseases that the rest of the world has to deal with it at times harm their crops. We don't have to deal with. so, you know, that foot, foot and mouth is the, I think that the one that they're talking about with the U S, that makes sense that you wouldn't want diseases like that here.

Now you could always argue, have we gone too far potentially? I don't know. But I think the biosecurity things have been a real source of strength for Australia in terms of meaning when the rest of the world has changes in its output because of disease, we've been relatively speaking, spared. so that makes sense. But to your point here, there is a real problem because, the Trump administration is now talking a huge number of things that Australia does. And you could see them being weaponized in ways that, okay, they might add tariffs on food, but basically everything's on the table. And so I could see that the biosecurity things that Australia currently runs being targeted by other tools, know, saying threats to our university sector or broader tariffs or steel, or even some of the military stuff that we have, there's not a separation between those tools being used. And you could see a wide ranging weaponization where they come with a list of grievances and expect us to meet all of those things. And if not, a whole bunch of separate punishments that are not related to those sectors are put on the table. And I think that that's a real concern for Australia. And we, we haven't maybe. Envisaged how bad it's going to get. now there's, there's a, there's another underlying theme in that line of questioning that you're doing, is that.

You know, this is a, it is a threat to our food security because they're going to block off one of our bigger markets, but the biggest there's a whole range of threats on the horizon, uh, that we maybe haven't yet discussed, which is, you know, so far we're producing more food, you know, climate change. We've been okay in dealing with them in the food production sense, not in a food system sense. Uh, but that may not always be true going forward. Just because we've been able to do it up until this point, if I look forward to where we're going in the future, there may become a point where we're not able to, you know, find the constant solutions for the increasing weather variability that we're facing. That's maybe if you're asking me, you didn't ask me, I did it myself to rank one of the things is okay, in the immediate, Trump is going to be a hustle for global food security. And there's going to be a lot of punishments put up on the table to try and put pressure on our biosecurity. I think it's actually more of a concern about our broader economy. then longer term is all the things that we've dealt with pretty well so far, there's no reason to say that we definitely will deal with those things as well in the future.

David Andrews

Well, I think that's actually a really useful point of transition to be able to bring Alison back into the conversation, rather than fully excising her with our Trump convo. But the innovation and research and science, which is obviously so fundamental to the work of the CSIRO, that's, I think, a great opportunity. So we don't want to just dwell in all the negatives here. Of course, there's one level of understanding food security, there's also understanding the challenges, but to focus on the opportunities and the advances. I think particularly, cereal crops is a great example of that from your personal background, but are there some things that stand out to you as innovations and research and advances that are occurring at the, let's use the intentional pun – at the grassroots level in food security that you can reflect on?

Alison Bentley

Yeah, there are a few and I'm sure they'll be familiar to your listeners. So we can talk about biotech and I think it would be useful and very much topical to talk about biotech and all of the potential that we have in the technology space there. We also have the alternative protein revolution, different ways to feed people, provide them with enhanced dietary diversity and thereby food security.

And then another area which I think personally in my research has been focusing on is this nitrogen challenge. And we talked about nitrogen driving crop productivity and we also talked about the cost, the environmental cost, not only of using that nitrogen in production, but also in actually making the nitrogen. And the global solution that's proposed to that or one of the global solutions is biological. So can we actually enhance the biological ecosystem in which a crop is produced?

And this is a really interesting area because it's can we apply microbial amendments, things like this, so biological fertilizers, biological stimulants, and use these as a strategy to partially phase us out of some of the synthetic fertilizer production as well as usage, but also have a really interesting biosecurity lens for Australia because a lot of the innovation in biological products has been done in Northern Europe, in North America and most of it's microbial based and we want to add it to the soil or the plant soil interface. But we can't because of our biosecurity regime, we can't just bring in these microbials and add them into a soil system without really understanding what do these microbials do.

And then we currently have a gap in regulation and governance of this whole class of biological agents, biological solutions for agriculture within our regulatory framework as well. So it's a real growth area, I think, because when we think about 2040, 2050, do we really want to be producing lots of nitrogen at a really energy intensive, environmentally costly way? Do we want to be shipping it around the world with all of the disadvantages that we've talked about? And then do we want to actually be using it and polluting in a local area as well? Or do we envisage that we will try and wean ourselves off it with other solutions?

And the growth in biological products in agriculture is just skyrocketing around the world, which tells you this is a growth area, but has a lot of questions underneath it and a lot of innovative science, but also a lot of regulation and governance, a lot of biosecurity considerations. So it's really an open field, but very exciting for us, especially people that research how plants respond to nitrogen. Is this a viable strategy? And it kind of links to it to a broader aspiration.

Then I think in the biotechnology space, we've got huge access to technology. We have had access to technology for quite a long period of time, but I think we're seeing that really mature in terms of products available in the market, performing in the market in canola, for example, or cotton where GM traits are accepted and really provide a compelling production benefit.

And I think those solutions, it would be interesting to get Dirk's take on this as well, really provide us with new ways to address some of the challenges that probably, as Dirk talked about, this incremental, we've been able to keep pace with the climate changes that we've seen so far. Predictions are these are likely to get worse, stronger magnitude, more frequent. So can we employ some of these biotechnology tools to really ensure that future production potential.

Dirk van der Kley

Do want me to jump in on that? So I'm going to talk also a little bit geopolitic-y because we're at the national security college and I can't help myself. I think there, there is a lot of potential there that that's you've seen already a handful of biotechnology. And what we sometimes mean by this for some of the listeners that don't follow this is, is genetic alteration of plants and that in the, that's we've been doing that for millions of years, but in ways that are less targeted than now, these days you can very accurately, genetically edit a plant and give it certain characteristics. Now you have to put that in the field and see if it actually works and it responds to a whole bunch of different things in practice. But you run into a consumer response and a governmental response. It's really challenging to get it out and to get consumer acceptance. It's a little easier for things like cotton, but once you start to talk about things that you're going to eat, it's much harder. And what we've seen in places like India and China, for example, is a real reticence to accept that. Now, I think particularly in China in the last three years, we've seen that change a little bit. if you look, for those of you that follow China closely, Xi Jinping hosted a big symposium for business leaders and everyone was talking about Jack Ma from, you know, Alibaba and elsewhere, but in the front row was a fertilizer company, a seed company, and a biotechnology company.

So at least from a government level there, they've sort of accepted that this is vitally important for their economy, notwithstanding that up until now they've been doing great on production, that geopolitically, this will be hugely important because controlling, seed varieties, also biologicals that allow you to, you know, produce food in a cleaner way is going to actually be very economically important. that's super, super challenging, super important. then finally, like, they understand that they can't keep producing food in the same way. There's a real clarity around that within China. Now for Australia, this provides opportunities in a number of ways. We are a world leader in agri tech in certain sectors. Some of it's biotechnology, some it's biological, some of it's just other innovations that we've come up with through the fact that we have such efficient farming.

In our region, we probably have opportunities to sell that that we haven't done yet. And it's really important. And I would actually suggest that India is the biggest opportunity. China in a way is a market that's not going to be open to us in certain ways. The U S is really challenging India, largest population in the world. It actually has a growing amount of undernourishment. It's surprising for a country that is developing so quickly. And it's probably half of that's the food systems. Half of that is a, is a technological solution, I would suggest.

Australia has been trying to find ways to collaborate with India and it's proving, you not that easy, this would be, I think, a way where there's a technological collaboration that we could sort of deal with that solves their problem. If you go around to countries across the region and we often think about, you know, telecommunications infrastructure and things like that, but the ordering of you go to Indonesia, to China, to India, the Philippines, when they sort of list their priorities, number one is almost always food security. It's one of the things that sits really, really, really high on their priority list. I think it's actually been relatively speaking underdone by the Australian government and Australian business in terms of the opportunity there, not just in terms of stuff, like we can sell food to them, but actually creating a system that really works for them as well.

David Andrews

Well, obviously being at the national university, we're huge fans of research and innovation and all the great things that Australian scientists and other academics have done in this space. I think that's a legacy that CSIRO sort of has for many years now as well, and one that we should all be immensely proud of. But just reflecting on these different kind of regional considerations and like we were saying before, in terms of different – you might say as a research communities, whether it's in Europe or the US or Australia or elsewhere. How much of the research we need to do in Australia is really uniquely driven by the Australian environmental climatic conditions? Like is that transferable across to, as Dirk's talking about, sort of a Southeast Asia Indian context? Is the work we're doing principally about Australian conditions, which are so unique? Or are they generally applicable outside of that?

Alison Bentley

I would say in my area of work, although we would like to think that we're specialists doing really specialist work in our systems, is that 60 % of our work is broadly applicable. It's about developing methodologies of analyzing complex data. It's about understanding environmental response. So that environmental lever you can change. I worked for a long time in Northern Europe, so you flick the lever the other way because the production system is a is a different beast. But actually what we're looking for is the transferable parts of these biological systems and which way we flick the lever depends very much on the context. Obviously we need local solutions. We need to be able to tailor our solutions to the local context. In the case of agriculture, broad scale agriculture, we need to be able to validate things in the field. We are not just producing a solution and hypothesizing that it's going to have that effect. And there's still nothing that allows us to really do that and it's not what we're looking to do. But we really do have these kind of core parts of our research which are about understanding mechanistic components of systems and those are quite broadly applicable and it's really the way that you switch the dial or the lever - dependent on the outcome. I think as researchers that's what we should all be aiming to do. We're very specialist in a cell type, in an organ type, in a plant for example, or a system. But to look at those common principles and ask about the applicability of those across different contexts. And that's how we'll get the most out of our, the value out of our research and create the kind of those data resources that we need to drive things in future by being able to link into bigger picture scenarios.

David Andrews

By the sounds of things as the international environment is shifting and as maybe cooperative science and research is becoming harder, it sounds to me like that's an even more important reason to be funding bodies like yours and like the of the research and academic sector in Australia to recognize that these opportunities exist and that can be turned into economic innovation as well. It's not just research for researchers sake, but it's building Australian security. It's helping us drive economic innovation, but it's also understanding that the world is changing at such a rapid pace that we have to put a lot more time into this research innovation space, not all money that comes along with that too. As Dirk said, we're seeing that in China, we're seeing that in all sorts of countries that that's a real challenge. So I might use that as sort of a final note on which to leave us all as we talk about food security today, but Alison Bentley and Dirk van der Kley, thanks so much for being with us on the National Security Podcast.

Alison Bentley

Thanks for having me.

Dirk van der Kley

Thank you very much.

National Security Podcast

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