Elsewhere, they are. Rising oil prices, food-for-fuel, declining food stocks and rising protein demand has created a web of cause and effect that is generating food-related stress throughout the world.

In Australia, consumers are feeling the pinch at the supermarket checkout.

In some of the world’s poorest nations, including Mexico, Morocco and Senegal, high cereal prices have already provoked food riots.

At a recent Australian Science Media Centre briefing in Melbourne, science journalist and adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney, Julian Cribb, suggested world food security is at its lowest since records on the situation were first kept in 1960.

In a discussion paper provocatively titled “The Coming Famine”, Professor Cribb said world grain stocks had plunged in the past seven years to the point where “year on year, humanity now eats more than it produces”.

He said it was a forewarning of what to expect in the next few decades as the world runs low on water, land, nutrients, and technology; as marine harvests collapse, as biofuels grow, and as droughts intensify under climate change.

Professor Cribb and fellow panelist, Professor Snow Barlow, of the University of Melbourne, argued the impending crisis made a powerful argument for renewed investment in agricultural research and capacity building.

In Professor Cribb’s words, investment in secure food supplies is defence spending.

“Agriculture is the basis for stability for every society on earth.

“Without a stable food supply, you have a society that is prone to fall into civil conflict.”

Australia must get its own farming in order and extend its agricultural expertise to cash-strapped regions where food scarcity could lead to unrest and floods of refugees, he said.