Tim and all his colleagues can each buy a few acres and start growing crops to sell at a lower price than is currently the case. No chance of that happening as they all get a handsome wage. What they want is for others to literally work for peanuts, sell their labour cheaply to make Tim and Co feel good.
Mate, you are the real problem, farming is an industry and any other approach is just going to end in tears. Hence the present problems.

Tim Anderson tells us that International trade in food is quite small compared to local production.

That is an important point: where people are in dire straits for food sufficiency it is fundamentally important to assist them to produce, at home, at least a basic minimum for their needs. However, consideration for that should go beyond the delivery of rice (or other) alone.

For instance, Tim notes the good news that the UNDP tells us that Timor Leste, in the period from 2000, reduced its dependence on imported rice from 2/3 to 1/3 of local requirements. Followed by the depressing information - “Then came the political crisis of 2006, followed by the food crisis of 2008.”

Following from those statements came the thought of “a need to generate a variety of schemes to stabilize and protect domestic food production.”

Tim, is stabilization and protection of food production enough? Perhaps it might be wise to consider that East Timor from 2000 to 2008, while it may have reduced its dependence on imported rice by half, has doubled its population. And with a current natural increase of 3.3 per cent, is on track to double its present numbers in about 20 years.

Tim, are you just another of those who deliberately censor the fundamental issue of a need to address population increase from your articles

Food and food security seem to be the flavour of the week on the forum.
There is an interesting essay at TomDispatch titled Are We All North Koreans now by John Feffer which sums up the situation quite well---at least to my mind.

tim ,your calculations are wrong.
230kg of corn produces 92 litres of ethanol.
your have also forgotten to add that for every metric tonne of grain going into ethanol , 300kg of 26% protein stockfeed is the co product. this is important in the intensive feed industry. there is work going on to make this meal into "museli bars".
if aust. was to add 10% ethanol to the petrol mix , 5 million tonnes of wheat would be required.aust. on average exports 20 million tonnes of wheat .
forget about food security and try to think about the regional development that a biofuels industry would create , benefiting all australians.
work out what the impact on gdp will be when aust. has to import all of the oil product ( in 2016). and then you will see that developing a biofuels industry is vital to extend automotive fuel out to 2050 when hopefully hydrogen will be present.
biofuels are not the panacea , but they will help extend our oil reserves and develop value adding of the aust. grain industries.