A Turning Point: U.S. Recognizes Agriculture as a Domain of Defense
Perhaps the most confronting aspect for Australian policymakers is the fourth pillar, regarding research security. The US has moved to prevent collaboration with countries of concern and ensure that agricultural innovation remains a sovereign asset. This lands squarely in the middle of our own government’s Strategic Examination of Research and Development, a review explicitly tasked with aligning our science system with national priorities and the Future Made in Australia policy. Yet, historically, we have treated agricultural research and development as a commercial commodity to be sold to the highest bidder or a global public good to be shared without restriction.
This agreement frames it differently: as high-grade intelligence. If the US is protecting its laboratories and linking them with defense research agencies such as DARPA, Australia cannot afford to leave its own institutions exposed. However, we must be careful not to import the innovation tax that currently plagues our defense sector.
Simply applying the heavy compliance burden of the Defense Trade Controls regime to every grains trial or cattle study would suffocate the very agility that makes Australian agriculture world leading. We need the protection without the paralysis. This requires a bespoke security model, one that builds high walls around critical dual-use technologies while keeping the gates open for the general research that drives our productivity. We must reclassify agricultural research and development as a national security asset, but we must carefully consider how to secure it.
The US’s plan also reframes nutrition from a welfare issue to a capability issue. The protection of the nutrition safety net is treated with the same rigor as the protection of a power grid. This mirrors the arguments we have made regarding our own Pacific neighbors: that nutritional security and food security are together the bedrock of political stability. If the US is hardening its nutritional systems against fraud and foreign exploitation, Australia must view its own domestic food availability through the same lens of resilience.
Crucially, the document prioritizes what it calls ‘risk-informed resilience planning’. This phrasing is not accidental. It moves beyond aspirational goals of sustainability and demands a hard-headed quantification of vulnerabilities. This is precisely the mechanism we have been actioning off the back of the National Food Security Preparedness Green Paper, which ASPI issued a year ago. The US has now validated the need for that methodology. They are not planning for efficiency or just-in-time delivery; they are planning for survivability.
Finally, the seventh pillar of the US document explicitly designates farms and food systems as critical infrastructure. It demands that agricultural stakeholders have both a voice and an advocate in national security. In Australia, we have made progress but we are not there yet. Our agricultural leaders are still too often viewed as stakeholders in the economy rather than partners in national defense. The developments in the US have changed the standard. If our Department of Defense does not have a formal, operational link with our agricultural sector—like the new nexus between the USDA and the US Department of Defense—we are operating with a structural blind spot.
The US has legitimized the role of food supply in national defense. It has recognized that in a world of rupture, a nation that cannot feed itself cannot defend itself. The National Farm Security Action Plan is not just a warning; it is a roadmap. The question is no longer whether Australia should treat food security as national security; it’s how quickly we can catch up.
Andrew Henderson is the principal of Agsecure and a senior fellow at ASPI. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
