Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

urban farms. The ‘cost prize squeeze’ refers to a situation where simultaneously thecost of inputs rise, the burdens of regulation increase and the market dominance of thesupermarket duopoly in Australia has leads to falling farm gate prices, which result infarmers, specially smaller ones, being driven out of business. One farmer described thedairy sector in these terms:There are basically three sectors in this industry: the good operators, with lowlevels of debt; the good operators, with high levels of debt; and those for whomit’s just a struggle. That last group tends to be younger people, and they get verylittle returns. The demographics of farmers show that we’re getting older. Theindustry has gone through a huge rationalisation: there were 33,000 dairy farmersin Victoria in the 1970s; now the country as a whole has 17,000. Two-thirds of thedairy farms in Gippsland have disappeared [Farmer, Melbourne].For this farmer, the regulatory burdens constituted ‘death by a thousand cuts’:It’s not any one thing – it’s everything together. There’s the cost of rural wages,and all the on-costs: super, Workcover, payroll tax. And then there’s taxes ontaxes, like the fire service levy, and parental leave. Four departments take theirlevies out of the milk cheque. The carbon tax will impact on our power costs, ourfuel and transport. Then we have multiple audits of the milk factory, by the MLA,and the EPA, and Food Standards. Food safety is necessary, but the red tape isvery difficult. There’s no one-stop department, and reform doesn’t happen,because bureaucrats have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are[Farmer, Melbourne].In the same vein, a smaller-scale market gardener from Casey-Cardinia commented onthe pressures and burdens she and her husband faced in their business:Probably fuel and labour costs. Some of the regulations are a fair call, and someare simply odd ... Paper shuffling (although necessary to some degree) is timeconsuming and not a priority of how we like to run our business, so the less thebetter as our occupation is very physical and we are not always educated to dealwith some of the paper and jargon related to regulations. I personally thinkAustralia is paranoid about regulations we live in a clean green country and Iwould like to see imported produce from China regulated and not given randomregulation on a percentage of produce but the whole lot, just like we areaccountable, it is totally contradictory [Market gardener, Melbourne].Similarly, in and around the Gold Coast, local growers expressed similar concernsabout the burden of regulation and about the low margins that exist for manyproducers. A representative of Queensland farmers observes:It is imperative that famers can compete on an equitable playingfield..[however]..it appears that in recent years the pendulum has swung awayfrom Australian famers [Non-government organisation, Gold Coast].The corporate domination of the Australian food system leads to the third barrieridentified by interviewees, namely cultural factors. One is the prevailing culture ofcheap food, and the convenience of take-away, which can lead to widespreadcomplacency about food, its provenance and availability as well as about issues ofwaste:Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 137