Australia is an agrifood powerhouse. We produce enough to feed approximately three times our own population. Our agricultural, fisheries and forestry sector produces $100.3 billion in value annually, with exports reaching $75.8 billion, making us one of the most significant food producing and exporting nations on the planet. Our food manufacturing sector, often underestimated in national conversation, turns over $173 billion in 2023–2024, employs 294,212 people, and represents 32.6% of all manufacturing employment in this country.
We are not a nation building from scratch. We are a nation sitting on one of the most significant food manufacturing foundations in the world.
So why does it feel like we are not fully capitalising on it?
The answer is not a shortage of innovation, research capability, or agrifood talent. It is a shortage of systems thinking and the commercial courage to invest across the full value chain from soil and sea to consumer, rather than at isolated points within it.
Global food systems are being remade right now. Geopolitical and geoeconomic pressures are fracturing supply chains that the world once took for granted. Countries are recalibrating who they depend on for food and sovereign manufacturing capability has become a strategic asset, not just an economic one. The Netherlands, despite being smaller than Tasmania, is the world’s second largest agrifood exporter. Canada’s food and beverage processing sector generated $173.4 billion in sales in 2024. Singapore, with almost no arable land, built Asia’s leading food technology hub through deliberate systems investment.
These nations did not win by growing more. They won by manufacturing smarter and by building connected systems where farmers, producers, manufacturers, researchers, government, and capital work as a unified commercialisation engine rather than in separate lanes.
Australia has every ingredient to do the same. Manufacturers who own their role in that system, rather than retreating to their slice of the chain, are the ones who will write our food sovereignty story.
The commercial case is urgent. A domestic market of 27.7 million people cannot carry the investment required to compete at the frontier of food and agribusiness manufacturing. The unit economics demand a global orientation and not simply through transactional export, but through deep in-region partnerships that embed Australian capability inside the markets we seek to serve.
$173 billion in annual turnover, 294,212 jobs, and a supply base that feeds three times our own population. That is not a promising starting point. That is a platform most food-producing nations would build a 20-year strategy around.
The question is not whether Australia can compete at this level. It is whether we are prepared to build the system that connects what we already have.
Angeline will be in Geelong at the GMC’s Technology and Innovation Summit on 29 and 30 April.
Dr Angeline Achariya is a Non-Executive Director across innovation, agrifood, and industry policy, and CEO of Innovation GameChangers. She speaks globally on food systems innovation, commercialisation architecture, and the future of manufacturing.