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Australia may be facing the risk of a “black swan” event that threatens the birds that gave the theory its name. Farmers, retailers and conservationists are all bracing themselves for the return of migratory ducks and geese in September that may be infected with the H5N1 bird flu variant.
That could have a devastating effect on Australia’s birdlife: ranging from the small little penguin colonies, to the giant poultry farms that provide much of the country’s protein, to the native black swans that inspired Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s theory about unexpected events.
Australia’s strict biosecurity laws — which involve confiscating meat and fruit from tourists, quarantining pets entering the country for weeks and spraying airline passengers with insecticide — have helped keep many agricultural diseases at bay including, thus far, H5N1. A breach could have a catastrophic impact on the country’s agricultural sector and reignite food inflation. With an election looming, a further rise in meat prices would have political implications.
For Adrian Turner, a Silicon Valley cyber security veteran who has returned to his native Australia, the potentially devastating impact of bird flu highlights that food security is fast becoming a new threat frontier that governments and companies need to prepare for. He pointed to the disruption in grain and fertiliser markets after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as an example of how food security is fast becoming a matter of national security.
Turner runs an AgTech start-up called ExoFlare and believes that Australia can carve out a global role as the “Palo Alto Networks of biosecurity” due to its long-established processes. He is not alone. A fundraising for ExoFlare last month was backed by Tesla chair Robyn Denholm’s family office alongside supermarket chain Woolworths and Cultiv8’s Agriculture and Food Fund. Other investors included former Rabobank Australia chief executive Peter Knoblanche and perhaps, most tellingly, In-Q-Tel — the defence venture capital company linked to the CIA that was an early investor in Palantir and Anduril.
ExoFlare’s systems were used across 700 sites to help contain an earlier outbreak of a milder form of bird flu in Australia this year. It triggered an egg shortage but could have been much worse. ExoFlare systems are used to track animal and people movements from affected farms so that sites can be locked down at speed while other clean sites can continue to operate.
ExoFlare, which was incubated by the agriculture technology accelerator SparkLabs Cultiv8, believes that the biosecurity threat — and opportunity — extends far beyond the farm gate. Its chief technology officer has Disneyland and shopping mall Westfield’s owner on his CV and so has a deep experience in a different type of herd management. Turner said the creation of digital audit trails for agricultural products could soon have a significant impact on trade: countries with poor reputations for biosecurity will be able to provide assurance that goods are disease-free. ExoFlare is already looking to expand into cross-border freight data analysis.
Dennis Voznesenski, an economist with Commonwealth Bank of Australia, said biosecurity plays a critical role in a country’s status as a “reliable supplier” of meat, grains and livestock but can also reduce the carbon intensity of canola oil, which is exported to Europe for use in biofuels, as Australia uses fewer chemicals to control pests and weeds. “Biosecurity can be both an indirect and direct selling point,” he said.
Turner believes biosecurity will soon be as important a topic in boardrooms as climate change and that companies could need to hire “chief biosecurity officers”. He compared the discussions around the subject to the early days of cyber security, when companies did not understand why they should pay for digital protection, and expects the discussion to evolve in a similar way.
“In the early days of cyber we had firewalls, which is like Border Force stopping biosecurity at the border. Then it moved to antivirus, which is like checking for poor biosecurity practices. In the future we will move to genomics to look for anomalies which is like deep packet inspection,” said Turner.
Another similarity is the interconnectedness of global food networks which, like communications systems, means that an issue, whether inadvertent or a deliberate attack, can have a devastating effect.
The role of biosecurity has a clear role to play in future food security and trade. With threats such as H5N1, Australia and other countries will need to be vigilant.
nic.fildes@ft.com
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