Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

ackyard/community gardenernot affiliated3 Food Security: perceptions and understandingThere is broad consensus that one of the major issues confronting society now and intothe future is food security a term now widely used in policy circles (see for exampleLawrence, Lyons and Wallington, 2010). In Australia, the Prime Minister’s Science,Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC) ‘Expert Working Group’ has drawn uponthe UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s definition, which states that:Food security is achieved when all people at all times have physical andeconomic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet dietary needsand food preferences for an active and healthy life (PMSEIC, 2010).The understanding from PMSEIC is that food security is a phenomenon characterisedby five different but interrelated components, including:Availability ‘sufficient supply of food for all people at all times’;Accessibility ‘physical and economic access to food at all times – equality ofaccess’;Acceptability ‘access to culturally acceptable food which is produced andobtained in ways that do not compromise people’s dignity, self-respect orhuman rights’;Adequacy – ‘access to food that is nutritious, safe and produced inenvironmentally sustainable ways’;Stability – ‘reliability of food supply’, as influenced for example by urban sprawl,continual supply of agricultural inputs, climate change impacts, and ‘weed,disease and pest incursions’ (PMSEIC, 2010:9).In this sense, food security, which was introduced as a concept in the 1970s, refersprimarily to the access, affordability and availability of food (Patel, 2007). Whiledefinitions of food security have shifted over time, an emphasis on the market,technological innovation and increasing productivity remain as important elements inmost narratives of food security.However, it is important to note that there is a counter-discourse, which critiques andchallenges this ‘productivist-technicist’ narrative. This counter-discourse expands thefood security arguments with concepts and terms such as food justice, food democracyand food sovereignty. Food sovereignty, for example, was introduced by theinternational farmers’ organisation La Via Campesina in 1996 as a necessary precursorfor food security (Patel, 2009). While there is a diversity of understandings, at the heartof food sovereignty movements is a ‘rights-based approach’, where people andsovereign states have the right to determine their own agricultural and food policies(McIntyre, et al., 2009). More than simply about access, food sovereignty seeks tomake transparent the power relationships inherent in agriculture and food systems as aprecursor to changing these into more equitable systems.This counter-discourse both engages with the global political-economy of food, andproposes an alternative of more localised and regionalised food systems, with a moreeven distribution of ownership of and access to productive resources. It also seeks toUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 107