‘Agriculture is foundational to our nation,’ says the US National Farm Security Action Plan issued in July.
Now the plan is being operationalised, with US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signing a memorandum of understanding that effectively ends the era of agriculture functioning solely as a commercial sector. The date of the memorandum, 11 February 2026, will go down as a turning point for those of us pushing for the elevation of food and agriculture to the level of importance of national security and defence.
The memorandum explicitly links the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) with the Department of Defense. It formalises a partnership between USDA scientists and the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop technological solutions to agricultural vulnerabilities. In doing so, Australia’s most important strategic ally has put its food system in the domain of defence and national security.
For years, I and others have argued that food security is national security. The US policy agreement ends the debate. The United States has not just acknowledged the link; it has institutionalised it. The National Farm Security Action Plan is the blueprint we have been waiting for and it confirms the importance and urgency of Australia’s own National Food Security Strategy.
The plan’s seven pillars represent unapologetic securitisation of the agricultural supply chain. Of critical importance to Australia is the second pillar, regarding supply chain resilience. The document effectively mandates the identification of non-adversarial partners to work with when domestic production is unavailable. This is the friend-shoring of food on a doctrinal scale. The US is building a fortress, and it is drawing a circle around the partners allowed inside.
For Australia, this presents a complex strategic challenge. While the US is its principal security ally, its agricultural sector is deeply integrated with markets that Washington is increasingly fencing off. The challenge for Australian policymakers is to navigate this bifurcation. We must ensure our supply chains are sufficiently hardened to guarantee our own sovereign and regional capability, while maintaining the interoperability required to partner with our major ally. We cannot simply be a compliance-taker; we must build a system resilient enough to survive on its own terms, regardless of the demands of our trading partners.
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 defence 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 defence sector.
Simply applying the heavy compliance burden of the Defence 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 rigour as the protection of a power grid. This mirrors the arguments we have made regarding our own Pacific neighbours: 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 prioritises 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 defence. The developments in the US have changed the standard. If our Department of Defence 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 legitimised the role of food supply in national defence. It has recognised 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.
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