Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

increased, the market dominance of the supermarket duopoly in Australia is leading tofalling farm gate prices. One farmer described the dairy sector in these terms:There are basically three sectors in this industry: the good operators, with lowlevels of debt; the good operators, with high levels of debt; and those for whomit’s just a struggle. That last group tends to be younger people, and they get verylittle returns. The demographics of farmers show that we’re getting older. Theindustry has gone through a huge rationalisation: there were 33,000 dairy farmersin Victoria in the 1970s; now the country as a whole has 17,000. Two-thirds of thedairy farms in Gippsland have disappeared [Dairy farmer, Mornington Peninsula].For this farmer, the regulatory burdens constituted ‘death by a thousand cuts’:It’s not any one thing – it’s everything together. There’s the cost of rural wages,and all the on-costs: super, Workcover, payroll tax. And then there’s taxes ontaxes, like the fire service levy, and parental leave. Four departments take theirlevies out of the milk cheque. The carbon tax will impact on our power costs, ourfuel and transport. Then we have multiple audits of the milk factory, by the MLA,and the EPA, and Food Standards. Food safety is necessary, but the red tape isvery difficult. There’s no one-stop department, and reform doesn’t happen,because bureaucrats have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are[Dairy farmer, Mornington Peninsula ].In the same vein, a smaller-scale market gardener from Casey-Cardinia commented onthe pressures and burdens she and her husband faced in their business:Probably fuel and labour costs. Some of the regulations are a fair call, and someare simply odd with the wonderment of keeping someone shuffling paper to givethem a job. Paper shuffling (although necessary to some degree) is timeconsuming and not a priority of how we like to run our business, so the lessminimal the better as our occupation is very physical and we are not alwayseducated to deal with some of the paper jargon related to regulations. Ipersonally think Australia is paranoid about regulations - we live in a clean greencountry and I would like to see imported produce from China regulated and notgiven random regulation on a percentage of produce but the whole lot, just likewe are accountable, it is totally contradictory [Smaller-scale market-gardener,Casey-Cardinia].In and around the Gold Coast, local growers expressed similar concerns about theburden of regulation and about the low margins that exist for many producers:We had a guy who ran a poultry farm and brought his eggs to sell in our shed ...but then along came the egg police who said he couldn’t sell his eggs becausehe’d broken some regulations and faced a $30,000 fine or two years in jail ... hewas so overcome by it all that he just gave up an burned all the chooks! [Localproducer].while a representative of Queensland farmers observes:It is imperative that famers can compete on an equitable playingfield..[however]..it appears that in recent years the pendulum has swung awayfrom Australian famers [Farming peak body representative].Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 53