The head of Woolworths Fresh Foods division, Michael Batycki, says big improvements in Australian rail and road networks would help drive down food sector costs.
Mr Batycki was part of the Australian Farm Institute's agribusiness roundtable in Canberra this week and raised his transport concerns as part of the forum looking at future challenges and opportunities in Australian agribusiness.
He said transport systems in Australia "could certainly be better", with rail "very much behind" what we experience in other countries.
Mr Batycki also believes infrastructure, or a lack of it, could be considered one of the missing ingredients from the expansion of farming so far in northern Australia.
The magnitude of the logistics business that Woolworths operates – with more than 100,000 truck movements carting up to 80 million cartons of freight each month serving 800 supermarkets with product on a daily basis - gives Mr Batycki the credentials to talk about the impact of transport on the Woolworths business and food producing sector.
He said the state of some transport systems made moving produce from regional and remote regions to the company's 11 major distribution centres "quite a tenuous task".
"Our transport infrastructure is not finely tuned to service Australia's needs from either the producers' end or from the retailers' perspective…," Mr Batycki said.
"We have a lot of single-lane carriage ways across the country and our rail freight system is not servicing our needs well enough in this day and age.
Mr Batycki said Woolworths sees a "fundamental disconnect" between State and federal governments, with States not having any capacity to establish the new rail links or the road train lanes required.
"A lot of freight actually shares commuter traffic laneways as well as rail and road," Mr Batycki said.
"One of the suggestions we've put forward is freight should be segregated from commuter traffic and could be moved a lot more efficiently with exclusive laneways running north south, particularly along the east coast."
He said supply costs could be improved if freight and transport systems were upgraded.
"Moving product as we do at the moment, primarily through road transport, is expensive," he said.
'It is also inefficient when we have to deal with the traffic and congestion we find on those roads.
Restrictions on container heights and volumes, for instance, were inconsistent between States.
"There is just no link going all the way from north to south.
"It's very disjointed and very inefficient for the way we move our products," Mr Batycki said.
"The type of rail links we have to contend with restricts the amount of product that can be moved from the eastern seaboard.
"There is huge potential for Australia to become the bread basket or the food bowl nation of the world - we've got wonderful land available to us, a wide variety of microclimates and in the north of Australia we have a wonderful source of water and available land to help with increased production that can be managed sustainably as well.
"There is room for us to grow more products in the northern regions – but having the ability to do that cost effectively and move that product to markets is something that needs to be worked on."
The Federal Government will reveal its priority list for major infrastructure projects by the end of the year.
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