Hungry in the food bowl

Every day they turn on the TV, open a newspaper or click on a tweet and are bombarded with politicians, international economists and global food security experts lauding agriculture as the cusp boom industry.

They hear messages exhorting farmers to double or treble their production by 2050 to meet the basic food needs of the world's nine billion hungry people.

The farm sector is told that guaranteed access to food - the ubiquitous hip phrase of food security - will be the key to every nation's future. That future world wars will be waged over sovereign ownership of fertile farms, food and water. And that Australia's continued economic prosperity, after the mining boom is over, will depend on agriculture and its ability to feed Asia's expanding middle class of 2.3 billion by 2030.