'Australian Food and Grocery Council CEO Tanya Barden says with the food manufacturing moving offshore in recent decades the industry faces “real challenges” which require confrontation to see stronger growth. “The challenges for all manufacturing is quite different from the food and grocery sector,” she said. “Over the last decade you can see that input and output prices really track alongside each other and, over time, you expect that rising costs will be passed through into final product prices. “The challenge with food and grocery manufacturing is that over the last decade we’ve seen a 50 per cent increase in input prices but output, or wholesale selling prices, have only risen by about 25 per cent. “That’s really quite unique for food and grocery manufacturing.” Ms Barden said those increases came from energy to commodity and freight prices. Sky News Business Editor Ross Greenwood pointed out that imported products come at “very cheap prices” – creating competition for locals. “There’s an uneven playing field,” Ms Barden said. “When you look globally, a lot of other countries have had a boost to their local manufacturing supported by very strong and long-term government policies that support research and investment, capital, capital investment and so on in food and grocery manufacturing in other countries. “Australia is at risk of falling behind, we’ve got a lot of aged infrastructure in the sector, and that makes us less competitive, and we have seen, as you say, an increase in imports over time.”'
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