Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

These are key in terms of increasing the variety of local food you can access,especially if you’re renting, and you can grow short-term crops and swap them forlonger-term crops that you can’t grow. The food swaps fill a really critical niche, interms of a resilient local food system. They are a great social network… we havefantastic social networks in our community, constantly swapping and giftingproduce. [Backyard gardener and permaculturalist, Melbourne].7 Barriers to urban agricultureThe principal political barrier to the expansion of urban agriculture is the perceived lackof any strategic vision for a sustainable and resilient food system, in the two case studycities or their respective estates. This expresses itself most acutely in relation to theexpansion of the urban growth boundary over prime farmland in Melbourne; but it isseen more broadly in the failure to fully integrate considerations of health and wellbeinginto state and federal planning and policy frameworks.The previous government of Victoria (the Brumby administration) attempted toestablish a state-wide, whole-of-government, integrated food policy. Some intervieweessuggested that this policy initiative ‘ran into the sands of obstructionism’ from within theDepartment of Primary Industries which was not convinced of the need for it.So we had a reasonable commitment to doing this. But it really just dragged, andwhen I look back now to some of the stuff we’d come up with, and had committedto in regional policy and climate change food strategy, the whole-of-governmentfood strategy. We understood why we’re doing it, and it had strong links toclimate change, and everything else – now we know that DPI was just basicallystalling it, at every possible opportunity. You’d have everything agreed, everyoneon side, and then you’d get this memo, saying, you can’t have this, why don’t youre-write that. And we’d be completely back to scratch. And there was justdragging of feet – so much time and energy going into something, that it wasalmost like a plaything at one level. They had to be forced. If the political will’s notthere to really make it happen, it doesn’t matter how much pushing you do fromthe policy officer level. There was an incredible educational process for thepeople involved. We took that many people from traditional DPI, who thought thatfood security is just about choice, and if people are fat, it’s because they’re eatingthe wrong food, through so many discussions of explaining, opening people’sheads…I’m sure it had a lot of educational benefits for a lot of people, butultimately it didn’t deliver anything on the ground [Former state governmentemployee, Melbourne].Reflecting on the failure of this attempt to establish an integrated and holistic state-widefood policy for Victoria, which would, amongst other things, have accorded a prominentrole to urban and peri-urban agriculture, and in particular to the protection of primefarmland close to the city, this interviewee identified a culture inside the Stategovernment, especially at more senior levels, which strongly militated against policychange of this nature:People would just say, agriculture’s DPI, but that wasn’t what I was talking about.So I really began to see how this handballing phenomenon worked insideUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 133