Given Australians’ cost-of-living struggles, the growing number of people relying on food charities and the increasing awareness of the problem with food waste, it’s not surprising that 2025 saw some major initiatives focusing on food sustainability and the operations of Australia’s food system.

In June 2025, Australia’s peak scientific body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), released what it called the first-ever stocktake of Australia’s food system. A food system is defined as a web of activities involving the production, processing, transport and consumption of food. Or, to quote the CSIRO Agriculture and Food Director, Dr Michael Robertson:

Our food system is more than just producing and exporting commodities – it’s also about providing equitable access to safe, nutritious and healthy food, produced sustainably for all Australians.

The document was released as part of the Food Systems Horizons project, a collaboration between the CSIRO and the University of Queensland, launched in 2024. It recognised that Australia’s food system was worth some $800 billion, feeding approximately 100 million people, including 27 million Australians, with food produced by around 100,000 farmers and delivered through more than 2500 supermarkets.

Although the report stated that Australia’s food system is, by and large, successful, it quoted some alarming statistics. For example, almost a third of Australian households experience moderate or severe food insecurity each year, while two-thirds of Australian adults and almost one-third of children and adolescents are overweight.  The Australian food system has the highest per capita hidden environmental and health costs in the world, yet the responsibility for food policy is spread between 11 different Australian government departments.

The report identified the need to take a more holistic view of the food system, rather than focusing on agricultural production and export statistics, saying that “competing perspectives of the food system can obscure or de-prioritise important societal goals.”  It concluded:

This report begins to consolidate an evidence base for negotiating the goals we need to manage across Australia’s food system and agreeing on actions for pursuing these goals. Embedding regular food system reporting into institutions that have a mandate to recognise and enable food system interactions is likely to be a necessary first step towards being able to ‘see’, understand and manage the food system. This will, in turn, support communities, governments and industries in working together to decide what Australia’s future food system should look like and what actions are needed to achieve it.

The CSIRO report likely fed into the Australian Government’s decision in August 2025 to allocate a substantial budget to develop Feeding Australia: A National Food Security Strategy and a new skills-based advisory body to be known as the National Food Council. The objective of the initiative is to set a long-term vision for Australia’s food security.