Market regulatory access barriers and pathways to market challenges for Australian emerging rural industries

The project is a comprehensive scan of market access barriers for six emerging commodities: coffee, hazelnuts, industrial hemp, insects, sesame, and truffles. Based on extensive desktop research and stakeholder engagement, it aims to develop guidelines and a toolkit to identify, understand, and address the following challenges:

• government-imposed rules and policies that affect production, processing, and marketing. For instance, an industry may face lengthy approval processes to obtain permits, spend excessive time navigating unclear standards, and endure long waiting periods and time-consuming administrative burdens, particularly in food safety and export protocols
• non-regulatory market access constraints within the context of current market dynamics, such as limited market knowledge, mismatch with consumer expectations, unclear product positioning, insufficient production capability, logistics challenges, low adoption of technologies, skill shortages, underutilisation of facilities and many others. These constraints can often stem from more specific, identifiable issues, for example, limited production capacity can be driven by specific factors such as facility constraints, high upfront investment requirements, and/or the high cost of maintaining a workforce. Also, social acceptance issues can hinder market access for emerging, novel products. Consumer scepticism and misconceptions about safety or benefits can slow demand, or delay market entry, and even complicate regulatory approvals.