Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

This would strengthen the case for supporting urban agricultural uses in the face ofcompetition from other uses, especially those within the board category of public openspace. Such findings are also backed my insights from our research participants. It hasbeen observed in many cities that the conversion of even a small proportion of existingpublic open space to more food productive uses would make a substantial andsignificant contribution to meeting the demand for urban agricultural land.Pothukuchi & Kaufman (1999, 2000) have done much to stimulate scholarly debateabout the place of food systems on urban agenda. They note the piecemeal approachto planning for the food system at the urban scale, and suggest four reasons why it is arelatively low visibility activity among planners and in the popular urban consciousness:1. Urban residents tend to take the food system for granted and unless they haveexperienced serious disruptions to food supply chains, show little concern withfood security as an issue of metropolitan scale supply;2. The historical development of cities has typically seen a separation of urbanand rural problems. Urban policy typically responds to problems of housing,employment, transport and crime and rarely considers food policy, which is arural issue;3. Major policy making institutions, such as the US Department of Housing andUrban Development (HUD) and the USA Department of Agriculture (USDA)have few connections or shared policy agendas, even if their policies both haveprofound impacts on cities; and,4. The mechanisation and industrialisation of farming has obscured the impact ofsuburban encroachment of peri-urban farmland. As they say, ‘...the loss of localfarmland that historically served cities went unnoticed in local grocery stores.’(Pothukuchi & Kaufman 2000, p. 214).Nevertheless, attempts to limit the loss of peri-urban farmland (or potential farmland)through the application of planning policies – such as the definition of an urban footprint– is not immune from criticism. As Condon et al. (2009) observe:The strategy of relying exclusively on this regulatory tool to ensure land isavailable for food production and to provide a buffer between agricultural andurban lands has significant limitations, is politically polarising, and fails toadvance regional food security or food sovereignty (p. 113).ConclusionsThere is growing concern about the vulnerability of our growing cities to a number offactors, including peak oil, global economic crises and climate change. Each of these islikely to have profound effects on the security of urban food supplies. Recent disasters,especially floods, have highlighted the fragility of food supply lines in Australian cities.Experience in the rapidly growing cities of the global south provides vivid illustrations ofthe damaging consequences for social order and civility if food security is seriouslycompromised in anything but the very short term.Food security is typically defined in terms of access to food as well as to its affordabilityand availability. Other related concepts are also used increasingly in policy and otherdebates, including food sovereignty, which promote a rights based approach to theownership and control of food systems.As more of the world’s population lives in cities, questions of food security and foodsovereignty increasingly take on an urban dimension. While much debate is concernedwith how to produce enough food for a growing urban population and how to secureUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 98