Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

increasing productivity. Thus, whilst there is general agreement around the basicdefinition of food security – the FAO definition is widely used and cited – there issignificant contestation over both the scale and the causes of food insecurity, and theresponses required to ensure adequate food access for what is likely to be a growingglobal population. There is even greater disagreement over the extent to which foodsecurity is and should be connected with notions of sustainability.It is important to note here that despite substantial evidence that there is currentlyenough food to achieve global food security, almost a billion people are consideredfood insecure, and at the same time, over one billion people are obese (Patel, 2008).Somewhat paradoxically, food insecurity is often linked with over-consumption and thediseases of obesity, especially amongst populations where people have access to lowcost, calorie dense (including high fat and sugar content) and nutritionally poor food, anissue we take up further below in relation to the social and economic determinants offood security.In our review of the literature, it is evident that food security is recognised as beingconnected to a broad range of factors, including social, economic, spatial and politicalfactors. These typically fit within two broad categories: social and economicdeterminants of food security and food and nutrition systems.4.1.1.1 Social and economic determinants of food securityVarious research suggests that food security is connected to a range of social andeconomic factors, including the inability to afford to purchase available food; insufficientfood availability; eating a nutritionally poor diet; energy poor diets; and chronic relianceon food aid/relief (see for example Browne, Laurence and Thorpe, 2009). Rychetnikand Webb et al. (2003) also identify employment, income, education, housing, area ofresidence and social inclusion as factors directly related to food security. Consistentwith Sen’s (1982) analysis, poverty appears to be a key factor limiting people’s accessto food. For low-income families, food may be the only flexible item in their householdbudget – whereas there is less flexibility on items such as rent/mortgage and utilitybills. As such, households on low incomes tend to cut their food spending in order tosurvive.While Australia is broadly recognised as being food secure, especially in relation tomany other countries and regions of the world, disadvantaged and low-income groupsare especially vulnerable in terms of food security. Recent Australian researchillustrates this trend.Lockie and Pietsch’s (2012) survey of public opinion on food security found that16% of respondents are often or sometimes worried that their food would runout before they had money to buy more, and 4% of respondents had neededemergency assistance from a charity, food bank, soup kitchen or other source.Browne, Laurence and Thorpe (2009) found that 24% of Indigenous Australiansreported running out of food in a 12-month period (compared to 5% amongstnon-indigenous populations). In another study, 51% of Aboriginal families inVictoria reported being food insecure. Such high levels of food insecurity wererecognised as being related to a range of social and economic factors, includingfinancial stress, housing problems, budgeting issues and lack of knowledge offood preparation.Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 14