Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee, , 5:27:22 to 5:29:59
Officials discuss hardening domestic supply chains against biosecurity threats like H5 avian flu and potential cyber incidents.
Topics: Biosecurity, Food security
Speakers: Miss Victoria Anderson, Matt Lowe, Senator Ross Cadell, Unknown Speaker
again when you're going there H5 landed in Australia I think chicken is the number one protein still in Australia now. Does that factor into on this that's a new threat where we always thought it might come. How do we deal with this in the food security plan? How do we deal with that in projections? I [clears throat] know you she said it hasn't hit poultry yet >> but there's real I mean what's America killed 200 million birds or something with H5. Oh yeah.
>> And Senator, we had an example um you know with the H7 outbreak that did get into chicken production facilities or chicken and egg production facilities last year. So we do we did see um supply chain interruptions as part of >> as part of that outbreak and that's something that's informing how we're thinking about the supply chain with H5 because the the um I guess the decision to eradicate would be the same whether you know regardless of disease. So we've had a we've had a bit of a dry run I guess with H7. Um, in terms of that link with the food security strategy, um, all sorts of supply chain disruptions are are possible. Everything from a cyber incident, you know, down to something directly.
>> But you factor in ask something, you just don't know what that something could be.
>> Yes. And I think we're sort of looking at the supply chain as a whole, thinking about how do you make a supply chain less vulnerable to any sort of interruption, whether it's a pest or disease outbreak, whether it's a drought, whether it's a an input disruption, um whether it's a supply chain logistics sort of issue. Uh so there's a range of different things and it's about I guess trying to harden those systems or look at ways that we might need to harden those systems to a range of different threats that might be
>> Does add to this? comments. I guess there's probably a few a few different lenses. So there's I guess the productive base that supports food production in Australia. Um so farm production, uh those sorts of things. And then there's the supply chains and that's both kind of the domestic supply chains and the international supply chains and their resilience to shocks. So that could be global shocks, that could be biocurity shocks, that could be drought, those sorts of things. um the economies in which they exist, the regional economies um and obviously agriculture and food production plays a vital role in regional economies as well. And then there's the lens um which I think you were touching on ear earlier around that is that has come through strongly as well around kind of affordable safe and healthy food as well and that food people have access to affordable safe and healthy food um and that it's nutritious and they have