He said the lab would bring together regional leaders in the fields of agriculture, freight, emergency management and water, along with other community partners, to identify risks and potential responses.
“We have a great ability to grow lots of ingredients and food for Australia and the world, but we want to be able to do it no matter what the conditions, and obviously there are some challenges in doing that if things don’t quite go according to plan,” he said.
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“It’s going to be a bit learn-by-doing. We’re going to try to identify what we think are the biggest risks in the area.
“I think they’re going to be around climate, and floods in particular, or things that might disrupt supply chains.
“If we can’t get herbicides into the region or our diesel supply was interrupted, how exposed is our region to that and what can we do to be prepared so that we can keep producing food, which drives our agriculture and more importantly drives our economy?”
Mr Sounness said WSMD brought food-security policy specialist Andrew Henderson – a co-author of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s National Food Security Preparedness Green Paper – to the region in May, hosting meetings with industry leaders as well as council and State Government officials.
Mr Sounness said attendees identified energy and fuel, inputs and freight logistics as the biggest risks to the region’s $1.4-billion annual agricultural output, highlighting a reliance on imports and a vulnerability to international supply-chain disruptions.
“Things like wars disrupting global supply chains we can’t control in any way, but we know they’re on the horizon and they may occur at any time,” he said.
“You can have an understanding of what impacts they might have and how we can lessen those impacts.
“In 2009 if you’d said we were going to have floods in January 2011, most people would have said ‘oh no, you’d never get floods at that time of year’.
“But we had them, and they had a lot of impact on the ability of people like farmers to move grain out of the region.
“Likewise, if we had interruptions at a port, we might not be able to get herbicides and fertilisers into the region.
“These are all big-picture things, but they actually impact individuals locally.”
Mr Sounness said WSMD also contributed a submission to the Federal Government’s National Food Security Discussion Paper last month.
He said it was important to raise awareness of food security as both a local and national issue, and for all levels of government to co-operate.
“It’s great having a strategy, but what that strategy actually means on the ground when it’s in place is what it’s all about,” Mr Souness said.
“Some of these things you have to do locally to really look at where the risks are and what we can do to control the uncontrollables.”
Mr Sounness thanked FRRR for the grant to help establish the lab.
“It is just a starting point – $20,000 isn’t going to solve our food-security-preparedness challenges – but it just gives us a chance to start working down that pathway and build it,” he said.
FRRR chief executive Natalie Egleton said it was important to invest in projects that tackled big-picture issues at a local level.
“The projects we’re funding present a range of climate solutions that showcase future-focused community-led responses,” she said.
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