#64 We Feed the World. We Can't Feed Ourselves. | Fuel & Fertiliser | Kate Banville Pt. 1

The season is already at risk — Australia's fuel is nearly gone and the fertiliser that should have arrived from the Gulf hasn't.
 
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Australia exports food to three times its population. Right now it cannot guarantee the fuel, the fertiliser, or the workforce to produce it.

That is not a supply chain story. That is a sovereignty story.

Kate Banville grew up on the land, served in the Australian Army, and has spent her career reporting on agriculture, food security, and national security - not as separate subjects, but as one problem. In this episode she and Todd Crowley work through three inputs that are failing simultaneously: fuel at 25 days of reserves, urea prices up 55% since March with 44% of supply flowing through the same Hormuz chokepoint now under pressure, and an agricultural workforce that was already 172,000 people short before any of this started.

Any one of these is a manageable policy problem. Two simultaneously is a systems threat. Three simultaneously, with no strategic buffer in any of them, is a different category of problem entirely.

Most Australians won't see it coming through a policy announcement or a news cycle. They'll see it the way they always do - at the checkout. A higher number. A shorter shelf. A gap where something used to be.

By the time the supermarket tells you there's a problem, every decision that could have prevented it has already been made. Or worse, not made.