Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

government, especially at more senior levels, which strongly militates against policychange of this nature:People would just say, agriculture’s DPI, but that wasn’t what I was talking about.So I really began to see how this handballing phenomena worked insidegovernment; and that trying to get people to talk about complex issues who didn’thave clear lines of responsibility was very difficult. You can get thoseconversations happening at officer level, and maybe at manager level, but it’svery hard to get real openness to people above that [level] thinking outside thebox [Former state government employee].In Queensland, the Newman government has commissioned an inquiry into the State’sagricultural and resource industries, but this focuses primarily on identifying andremoving unnecessary regulatory barriers, and there is little recognition of land useconflicts except in relation to tensions between famers and miners in, for example, theDarling Downs.In addition to important issues such as the loss of prime farmland to urban expansion,foreign ownership of agricultural land and land hoarding, interviewees also raised theissue of the corporate domination of the food system, and its impact on farmers,suppliers and consumers. The concentration of ownership within the Australian foodsystem leads to the third barrier identified by interviewees, namely cultural factors ofwhich there are two principal aspects. One is the prevailing culture of cheap food, andthe convenience of take-away, which can lead to widespread complacency about food,its provenance and availability and about issues of waste:Why do people buy so much food that they throw out? Why is there such adisregard for food? If you could turn that into dollars, people would certainly havea concern about how much they were throwing away [City of Yarra urbanagriculture officer].This complacency leads to the second aspect of the cultural barrier which participantsidentified, a widespread lack of awareness of the key issues and problems concerningthe food system, and engagement with them:There is a real lack of awareness of the need to change. Most of the population isnot aware. People need to be more uncomfortable, or have barriers to actionremoved, such as cost incentives. It’s really troubling that so many people don’thave basic food growing and preparation skills. We set up a garden in aneighbourhood house, but a lot of people there will look at silverbeet and notknow what to do with it. And this applies across the wider population – we’relacking basic cooking, and food preparation, and preserving, skills. There’s apsychological shift that needs to happen, for people in general to value foodgrowing as a worthy thing to do. People forget that there’s a farmer behind everymeal they eat [Permaculturalist and backyard gardener].Our interviews with the farmers and growers revealed, however, that urban sprawl wasnot their principal concern. Nor was climate change. Rather, it was the commercial,financial and regulatory pressures they were facing, which took the form of a so-called‘cost-price squeeze’ in which as the cost of inputs rose and the burdens of regulationUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 52