Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

shift the focus back to individual and community-level health and well-being, and toinclude questions of environmental sustainability and resilience.As mentioned earlier, more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities. Thisurban population has, arguably, not only become increasingly disconnected from theorigins of food, but is also reliant on an increasingly globalised economy of monetaryexchange to access food. Vulnerabilities are exacerbated when economic resourcesare low, and when supplies of food grown outside of cities are compromised due toclimatic variability and extreme weather events. Feeding growing city populationsrequires transporting food from outside its boundaries and increasingly from regionsabout which the consumers know very little, although this applies to many goodsconsumed by contemporary city dwellers. Dixon (2011) refers to this disconnectionbetween people and the origins of their food as a metabolic rift, a disconnection andvulnerability that was also highlighted during this project’s fieldwork in Melbourne andthe Gold Coast.Research undertaken for this project revealed differing perceptions of food security. Atnational and state government levels, food security is currently treated more as anopportunity rather than a problem. With the understanding that Australia exports agreat proportion of its agricultural production (roughly two thirds), the challenge ofglobal food security has been reframed as an opportunity for Australian agri-businessand manufacturing sectors, to become, as the Prime Minister put it recently, the ‘foodbowl of Asia’. This view was echoed by the Victorian Government’s Minister forAgriculture and Food Security, Peter Walsh, who in May 2012 called on the Victorianfarmers to double food production by 2030 in order to meet ‘growing global demand forfood and fibre’. These optimistic and opportunistic views reinforce the impression thatat the federal and state levels, domestic food security is not a concern.This attitude by government agencies towards domestic food security was made clearto the research team by individuals with knowledge of the Victorian Department ofPrimary Industries:[There] is a growing group of traditional economists sitting within the researcharms of DPI, orthodox, economic rationalists. They have a lot of power [and] havebeen responsible for poo-poohing concepts like food miles, or small farms versusbig farms…They’ve no interest in urban agriculture, and are going out of theirway to actively disparage it. Any food growing that’s not large-scale, commercialproduction oriented to export, is [for them] largely a waste of time [Stategovernment employee, Melbourne].The macro and global view to food security adopted by state governments was sharedby another interviewee who has carried out extensive research on the topic.In [Victoria], [food security] is talked about in terms of global-level food security,not state-level food security. It’s talked about to justify the continuation ofintensive farming in order to ‘feed the world’…It really is purely about [productionand] supply. It doesn’t include any sustainability elements, it doesn’t include anysocial justice elements, and it doesn’t include any community or household-levelfood security elements [Academic researcher, Melbourne].Conversely, the semi-autonomous state government agency VicHealth has been asignificant institutional driver for mainstreaming food security at the policy and projectUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 108