The supply chain task force recommended the establishment of a supply chain office, and I think we have to look at something analogous to that for the food system. You literally have hundreds of thousands of farms, tens of thousands of retail outlets and food processors. The system does a very good job coordinating on a day-to-day basis, but then you start to throw in these unexpected events and it becomes quite challenging.
I do think that having coordinated oversight—a whole-of-government approach, as discussed at the previous panel—is one of the concrete measures that governments can take to play the role they can play. Moreover, they can take some real steps to make sure that there is concrete coordination between different levels of government, even down to the larger municipalities.
They can also look at things like how we digitize information across the system so that non-competitive information might be available for making quick and easy decisions, and finally, undertake an exercise to really understand what the critical points and risk points along the supply chain are and how we can bring stakeholders together in an appropriate manner when there are problems, so that they can work together to solve them.
These are some of the concrete measures that governments can take to play the role they can play. They can't fix all of the problems, but I think there is a very important role for governments here.