Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

Another important and tangible role that local governments can play to demonstrateleadership and commitment to local urban agricultural practices is through the adoptionof procurement policies that support locally grown food:This would be government sending a clear signal, and creating demand for suchfoods. By setting standards about public procurement, it won’t be the soleanswer, but could stimulate production to meet those requirements. At themoment we don’t have any – and we need them. That would cover health, andethical, sustainably-produced food. There are different approaches as to how thiscan be done. In the United Kingdom, there are government procurementstandards for national departments, for example, eggs must be free-range,certain proportions of coffee and tea must be fair-trade, certain proportions offood must be sustainably grown, and so on [Academic researcher, Melbourne].Similarly, there are policies in place which incidentally support urban agriculturalpractices. On the Gold Coast, Gold Coast Permaculture proposed the diversion of partof the aquatic weed waste taken from the many water bodies from the city to its site tobe composted. In that way, a material perceived to be waste is not only re-used but isalso used as a micro-business opportunity as the excess compost can be sold to thegeneral community. However this process is not as easy and simple as it seems:We divert waste streams from the Gold Coast City Council. We take their aquaticweed and we take their woodchip because normally they'd dump that in a tip.They tip all their aquatic weed, about almost 1200 tonnes a year, into landfill andso we've taken about, I guess, 500 cubic metres of that stuff so far; which is asignificant amount and we compost it… But now Council is saying, ‘Oh hang on,there are competition rules out there that say, we can't give this to you, all thiswater weed,’ seriously, ‘So we've got to tip it.’ I mean how dumb is that? Butyeah, council won't give it to us because they think it's against competition policy.There's a competition policy out there that all councils have to follow, which istotally nuts. So they'd rather dump it than give it to us [Micro farmer, Gold Coast].The cost-price squeeze and the power of supermarkets were mentioned by commercialgrowers and others as a significant barrier. One way of addressing this is by thesupporting diversified distribution and retail outlets. Farmers’ markets, supported by theVictorian Farmers’ Markets certification scheme, have expanded significantly inMelbourne and beyond in the past decade. On the Gold Coast, there is now asignificant network or markets with plans for further growth. New distribution modelssimilarly based around more direct forms of exchange between producers andconsumers are also being trialled and scoped - CERES FairFood, Gold CoastPermaculture and the Casey Food Hub project, are all examples of this model.Land access and soil contamination were also major concerns for the expansion ofagricultural practices within cities, especially in the inner parts of Melbourne, whereland is scarce and known to be contaminated from previous land uses. With regard tothe issue of soil contamination, interviewees recommended that rather than leaving thisto individuals and community groups, a more systemic approach was required. It wassuggested that local governments should carry out audits of public land that mightpotentially be used for food production in order to identify levels and types ofcontamination. Another proposal involved the allocation of extra resources withinUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 144