AUSTRALIA has seized on growing concern about global food shortages to demand the world embrace a new round of trade reform.

Trade Minister Craig Emerson warned yesterday that civil strife in the Middle East was partly linked to food shortages and called on the international community to slash trade barriers and allow its most-efficient food producers, including Australia, to lift their production.

As the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences yesterday upgraded its forecasts of Australian farm production and exports, Dr Emerson declared looming food shortages had turned the cause of trade reform into an issue of global stability.

"The single most-powerful means of dealing with the food security problem is through agricultural trade liberalisation," Dr Emerson told The Australian.

His declaration came as G20 agriculture ministers began arriving in Paris for a summit to discuss UN predictions that although the world would need to produce 70 per cent more food by 2050 to feed its population, agricultural production was expected to slow to 1.7 per cent a year in the decade to 2020.

The G20 meeting, to be attended by Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture Mike Kelly, will consider establishing an international food-stock database, reducing trade barriers and the effect of speculation on food commodity prices through commodity-derivative markets.

ABARES yesterday highlighted the capacity of the nation's farms to step up production for global markets by upgrading its forecasts for the sector's export earnings in 2011-12 from $32.5 billion to a record $34.1bn.

The commodities forecaster says crop exports are tipped to rise 12.2 per cent to $19.4bn, while livestock exports will be flat at $14.7bn, partly as a result of the ban on live cattle exports to Indonesia. Australia's total farm production is tipped to rise 2 per cent to a record $50.3bn in the coming year.

According to Dr Emerson, who is leading a push by free-trading nations to revive the long-stalled Doha Round of World Trade Organisation talks, trade liberalisation is the answer to inadequate food production.

"That enables food production to concentrate in those areas that are most productive at producing food," he said.

"That means a greater amount of food at lower cost. That's the equation that countries worried about food security are looking for: quality and price. Specialisation through free trade in agricultural products enables both of those to be achieved - that is, greater quality at lower price."

Dr Emerson, who is working with Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig on the issue, said Australia's efficiency in agricultural production meant it could become "the food bowl of the world", notwithstanding the problems of Murray-Darling Basin.

This would ease global food shortages and boost job creation and wealth in the nation's regional areas.

Dr Emerson said food riots in poor nations in 2008 and political instability in nations such as Egypt and Tunisia this year highlighted the risks of inaction.

"As a result of policy failures over the last few years, there has been a very substantial increase in the number of people who go to bed hungry every night. It's been up to one billion people and we can't, on any moral basis, justify that."

National Farmers' Federation chief executive Matt Linnegar said Australia should continue to press for a multilateral trade agreement that would give Australian farmers greater access to foreign food markets.

This, he said, would help Australian farmers but also begin to tackle the emerging global food crisis.

Mr Linnegar said an alternate global trade framework was needed if the Doha round of negotiations failed to address more than just the "low-hanging fruit" and remove some of the domestic subsidies that prevented Australian food producers accessing foreign markets on an equal footing.

His comments came as NFF president Jock Laurie and the federation's manager of trade and economics, Charles McElhone, held trade negotiations in the Argentine city of Buenos Aires before heading to Canada for a meeting of the Cairns Group - a collective of 19 agricultural exporting nations committed to trade liberalisation.

Opposition food security spokesman John Cobb also backed trade liberalisation.

"If they (the Europeans) want to remove trade barriers, we are certainly interested and happy to get more involved," he said. "But they will have to do a lot, lot more than talk to show they are fair dinkum."

Mr Cobb also said productivity gains through research and investment initiatives were important, warning the government not to cut agriculture funding. Liberal backbencher Josh Frydenberg also called on the government to give greater consideration to the challenge of food security over the next 40 years.

In a speech to parliament Mr Frydenberg said the government should embrace the opportunity presented to it at October's meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government to push for more co-ordinated international action on the issue.

The ABARES figures reveal the value of wheat, oilseeds, rice and sheep meat exports are all set to rise next financial year, on top of the 12 per cent rise in export earnings across the entire farm sector in 2010-11.

Jack Foster, who grows wheat, barley, sorghum and sunflowers on a 1214 ha property near Gunnedah in northern NSW, said he had already boosted his production of sunflowers for oilseed to capitalise on demand.

"I'll grow as much as my land will allow," Mr Foster said.

In Paris ahead of the G20 meeting, French Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire told reporters the ministers wanted to avoid the 21st century being "the century of hunger".

"We think the international community would not understand if we don't take decisions," he said.

France is also arguing that speculation in commodity-derivative markets must be regulated to prevent rising commodity prices.

Total managed-money investments in agricultural commodities grew to a record $126bn in the year ended March, more than double the $55bn invested during the commodities boom of 2008, according to data from Barclays Capital.

Dr Emerson said the real problem was the disparity between demand for food and the world's ability to produce it under current trade regimes.

Read more on The Australian.