Trevor Whittington, CEO WAFarmers

Australia has just signed up to a free trade agreement with the European Union, which is being sold—predictably—as a great leap forward for the inner city consumer ... Out in the paddock, however, the mood is less celebratory. Because the small print tells a more familiar story. Australian once again, signed a deal where farmers pay the costs.

As the Iran–USA–Israel conflict ripples through global fertiliser markets, Western Australian farmers are discovering just how fragile their supply chains really are. At the centre of it is CSBP, which has reached for the force majeure clause in its contracts to step away from its contractual obligations.

Urea hit the equivalent of $2,800 a tonne in today’s dollars back in 1974. That’s not a typo—and it’s not ancient history either. To understand how that happens, you need to start with geography. Roughly a third of global fertiliser trade by sea—not production, trade—passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

Yet drive through Perth and the metropolitan fuel system appears to be operating normally. No ration notices. No capped pumps. No anxious motorists sneaking jerry-cans into the back of Hiluxes ... something more curious is emerging: selective rationing.

There was also something about prioritising regional areas. What there was not was anything resembling a system to track where fuel shortages are actually occurring, or to require distributors to send fuel where it is most needed.

When governments start calling emergency roundtables it usually means one thing: The planning should have happened years ago. Last week the Western Australian Government convened a “Fuel Security Roundtable” in response to supply disruptions linked to rising tensions in the Middle East.

This article is a rerun of a piece I first published in these pages back in November 2023 ... Readers may recall the strategic fuel debate that ran hot a few years ago when the BP refinery in Perth was about to close and Australia suddenly realised it only had a couple of weeks of fuel reserves.

I’m continually amazed how many people can fly to Bali yet couldn’t point to it on a map. Ask them to name the countries that sit north of Indonesia and you’ll usually get a blank look. Yet geography still matters. In fact, it quietly dictates how the global economy works.

Beneath the agreeable language embedded in regenerative agriculture — soil health and sustainable ecosystems — sits a more consequential proposition: that modern, input-intensive agriculture has overshot its optimal point and that government policy should now encourage a structural shift toward lower-input systems. That is not a trivial adjustment. It is a claim about the production frontier of Australian agriculture. Claims of that magnitude ... warrant far more rigorous empirical scrutiny than they have so far received.

As the WA sheep industry watches in disbelief the rollout of the federal government’s transition package — where $139 million seems to be evaporating before our eyes — one thing is becoming painfully clear. The design of the funding means the vast majority of sheep producers impacted by the end of live exports won’t see a cent.