Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

generations this history has been forgotten by many city dwellers. Although there areclear signs of a resurgence of interest in local food growing, there remains a degree ofantipathy to its expansion in some quarters.Associated with this antipathy but also with important concerns about the public healthaspects of urban food production, there is a regulatory regime that in many Australiancities that does little to encourage urban agriculture. Even though such discouragementmay not have been the original intent of such regimes, they can in practice work thisway. More general attempts to de-regulate may be beneficial but these are more likelyto be effective if carried out as part of broader programs to promote greater foodsecurity. This third area holds some potential as there is a growing number of citiesaround the world that are developing systematic and strategic food security programs,most of which include the promotion of urban agriculture in their repertoire of policymeasures.4.2 Results from case study fieldworkThe themes used to structure the literature review were explored in more detail in twocase study locations, Melbourne and the Gold Coast. Drawing primarily on data frominterviews with a range of local key informants, this section draws also on relevantpolicy documents relating to each area.4.2.1 What do we mean by food security?The research undertaken for these case studies has revealed that the divergingperceptions of food security are very noticeable in Melbourne and the Gold Coast. Theprevailing view at the national and state government levels appears to be that Australiais food secure because it exports a substantial surplus (roughly two-thirds) of itsagricultural production. From this perspective, the challenge of global food security isreframed as an opportunity for Australian agri-business and manufacturing sectors, tobecome, as the Prime Minister put it recently, the ‘food bowl of Asia’. This view wasechoed by the Victorian Government’s Minister for Agriculture and Food Security, PeterWalsh, who in May 2012 called on the state’s farmers to double food production by2030 in order to meet ‘growing global demand for food and fibre’. Similarly, the FederalMinister for Trade and Competitiveness, The Hon Dr Craig Emerson, argued recentlyat a conference on the future of Australian’s mid-sized cities, that their future lay inbeing part of a greatly expanding agriculture and food processing industry that wouldmeet the growing demands of the Indian and Chinese middle classes. In this framing,domestic food security – at the regional, state and national level, is simply taken forgranted, irrespective of climate change and any other challenges such as Peak Oil orglobal economic turbulence. This view is clear also in the recently published AustralianGovernment Green Paper, Towards a National Food Plan for Australia (AustralianGovernment, 2012).This attitude of complacency regarding domestic food security appears to include,within parts of both the Victorian and Queensland governments, open contempt forideas and practices associated with ‘local’ food, including urban agriculture. This wasmade clear to the research team by individuals with detailed knowledge of recentchanges in the Victorian Department of Primary Industries (DPI):Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 31