Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

ased on ‘just-in-time’ principles that have been widely adopted by industry as a way ofgenerating efficiencies, especially by reducing the costs of maintaining and holdingstock. Long supply chains have been identified as sources of food insecurity (Gertel,2005), since no stocks or reserves of food are held anywhere along the supply chain.While long supply chains financially benefit the major supermarkets chains by reducingstorage costs (Barling & Lang, 2005), they leave communities vulnerable whensupermarkets are the only place to buy food, and their supply chains and distributionnetworks are disrupted. To address food insecurity, some researchers have advocatedthe maintenance of shorter (i.e. local and regional) supply chains as they have thepotential to ensure more consistent food availability, diversity and security (Marsden etal., 2000; Ilbery et al., 2004).Long supply chain vulnerability was experienced in Brisbane in 2011 when majorflooding saw the closure of the central wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Rocklea.With the key fruit and vegetable wholesalers under water, supermarket shelves quicklyemptied as panic-buying set in. Similarly, a pamphlet entitled ‘Nine meals fromAnarchy’ by Andrew Simms (2008) of the New Economics Foundation in the UKdescribes the impact of strikes (for example by the drivers of petrol tankers) in bringingthe UK food distribution system quickly to a standstill. In this situation, with city-basedretailers only carrying enough food for three days (or nine meals) the vulnerability of anoil-dependent and long supply chain system becomes unsettlingly clear. Long supplychains contain multiple, inbuilt vulnerabilities in relation to the very real threats of peakoil and climate-related natural disasters. Urban agriculture, as a more local and diversesystem has the potential to bring some degree of control of the food system closer toconsumers, providing access to a cheap and nutritional source of food, and in doing so,mitigate some of the negative effects associated with a more oil-dependent, global foodsystem.4.1.5 What is the extent and impact of urban agriculture in Australiancities?From an historical perspective it is interesting to note that while some see thecontemporary city as place a where agriculture does and should not exist, cities untilrecently were significant places of primary food production as well as processing andconsumption. However, cities have never been self-sufficient in food and as Steel(2008:72) notes:It can be tempting to hark back to a golden age when all food was produced andconsumed locally, with no more than a short trip ‘from field to fork’. But of courseno such age ever existed.From the cities of ancient Greece, through imperial Rome to the mercantile cities ofnorthern Europe in the Middle Ages, cities have relied on food grown elsewhere tomeet their needs, partly because of its cheapness when compared to local productsand partly because as cities grew they converted their peri-urban farmland to urbanuses, mainly for housing. These factors continue to influence the structure of urban andmetropolitan food systems in Australian cities.As noted above, in contemporary cities urban food production takes many forms and isoften informally organised, making it difficult therefore to accurately gauge its extent,Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 25