Stefan Vogel

I'm Stefan Vogel.

I'm the general manager of Rabobank's research team in Australia and New Zealand.

And it's great to talk today about fuel, fertilizer and everything that the Strait of Hormuz might mean for our farmers and consumers.

Absolutely, and it already does have an impact for sure.

Right now, a lot of what is happening is more based on fear than real shortage of supply.

But if you look at the Strait of Hormuz, it is a really important bottleneck for many, many goods that we need in Australia.

80% of our beef, sheep, grain move to the world market, but we're actually extremely reliant on imports.

So diesel imports, about 80% of the diesel we're using is coming from abroad.

But clearly, we are also very heavily importing fertilizers from the world market.

More than 90% of the nitrogen fertilizer that we use in the country is coming from abroad.

So the whole supply chain is feeling the impact right now.

And the concern clearly for farmers is I need to put a crop in the ground and we're in the planting period right now.

Do I have the fertilizer?

Do I have the fuel to actually make that crop happen to harvest?

Because prices have gone up massively for both fertilizer and fuel on farm.

Yes, the fresh produce sector is definitely a more vulnerable one.

Clearly, if you think about the timing, you need to get them off the farm at the time when they're ripe.

Fresh produce is maybe more vulnerable in terms of prices and seeing those price changes maybe a bit quicker in the supermarkets.

And it is, first of all, the transport and the fuel costs that are adding in it from a supply chain perspective and from a food perspective, not so much the fertilizer costs.

The meat prices of beef and sheep meat were relatively strong already on farm, given of a local supply shortage of sheep meat, for example.