A report by Future Directions International says Australia produces enough food for 60 million people, nearly three times its population, but is surrounded by countries where people are consistently hungry, or have no food security.

“There are a large number of people in our vicinity who don’t have enough food, and that could become a serious security issue,” Major General John Hartley, director of Future Directions International, and the former head of Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation, told Fairfax Media.

“We will see greater conflict between and within nations and we will see the movement of large numbers of displaced people across the world, driven by food shortages. Looking south to Australia, they see a large country, a developed country, with a small population, and it is a very attractive option.

“We don’t want to see large numbers of people coming to Australia illegally because there is no food in the place they are from.”

South Asia is already struggling with "food insecurity" and there is “almost no more arable land” in which to expand farming, the FDI report found.

Nearly 300 million people are food insecure across the region. In India alone, 59 per cent of the country’s children are stunted because of malnourishment.

Further afield, the UN says “catastrophic food insecurity” in South Sudan has left four million people – a third of the country – hungry, and estimates that 50,000 children could die of starvation if there is not intervention in the war-torn country.

In Syria, civil unrest was driven not only in reaction to a brutal authoritarian regime, but also by a devastating five-year drought that left 60 per cent of farmers with no crop at all, and 800,000 people with no livelihood.

The parts of the world that are hungriest already will see the largest growths in population over the next generations, Major General Hartley said.

Hunger will drive mass migrations of people across borders, typically in rapid, uncontrolled, and often violent displacements.

“Where the largest population increases will be over the next 30 or 40 years, are where people are already struggling to feed themselves, and these are people that cannot afford to pay more for food. That is why this is such a critical issue,” Major General Hartley said.

He said the world needed co-operative solutions, and improvements in local growing capacities, to address global food shortages now, before widespread humanitarian crises emerged.

About 80 per cent of the world’s food is eaten in the country it was grown in, but, as well, between one-third and a half of the world’s food is never eaten: it is wasted, deteriorates on the way to markets, cannot be stored, or is thrown away.

Australia is in a minority of countries across the world that exports a significant amount of the food it grows. About 70 per cent of Australian production heads overseas, contributing to the diets of more than 400 million people.

“When I was head of Defence Intelligence, this was never something we discussed as a security issue,” Major General Hartley said. “But my sense is now, people are beginning to realise how critical this is. There are large parts of the world where clearly, people are not getting enough food. Really, in many places, the global food crisis exists already.”