Australia's $800bn food industry has highest hidden costs per capita

CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, has released its inaugural report on the $800 billion Australian food industry, highlighting the importance of identifying and measuring "hidden costs" to ensure sustainability.

In its Towards a state of the food system report for Australia report, CSIRO urges a new approach to managing and reporting on our food system to ease challenges faced by farmers, meet critical sustainable challenges and more.

CSIRO believes there are "multiple perspectives and scales" from which food system sustainability can be assessed and managed, and if viewed from a single sectoral or methodological perspective, can "obscure our understanding" of its sustainability.

This includes targeting proper sustainability goals, regulatory reforms, and introducing system-wide assessments of sustainability across the entire sector instead of individual product assessments.

Further, the report also revealed that Australia has the highest hidden costs within a food system per capita in the world, primarily environmental and health impacts with costs ballooning over $274 billion, CSIRO said.

CSIRO agriculture and food director Michael Robertson said in-depth understanding of our food system is critical in uncovering complex challenges and opportunities.

"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," Robertson said.

"We have an intergenerational responsibility to pursue these goals vigorously. This national stocktake provides an evidence base to guide our actions as social, cultural, environmental, and economic priorities shift.

"While Australia's wider food system is an economic and production success, generating more than $800 billion annually and providing significant employment particularly in regional areas, the intersection of our food system with other critical goals calls for a more comprehensive way to evaluate its performance."