Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

that has been linked to power in the food supply chain being concentrated inmultinational corporations and driven by the imperatives and preferences of westernnations. Concerns have also been raised about the waste of food in the developedworld, with estimates that one third of all food produced is discarded (Gustavson et al.,2011). Research into supermarket dominated supply chains reveals a system of private‘quality’ standards whereby fresh food is rejected on the basis of cosmetic appearance(Richards, Lawrence and Burch, 2011). In Australia, the Coles/Woolworths duopolycontrols around 80% of the fresh food retail market (ACCC, 2008), leaving fewalternative outlets for fresh food that does not meet their stringent standards onappearance rather than nutritional quality or seasonality.Another complexity to this issue of food supply and availability is climate change andextreme weather events as was experienced recently in Australia with floods,cyclones and fires destroying food crops and food distribution points such as theBrisbane wholesale markets. Coupled with this, the monoculture approach toagricultural production also increases vulnerability by placing all of the ‘eggs in onebasket’ as was experienced when cyclones Larry and Yasi wiped out much of thenational banana crop in north Queensland in 2006 and 2011 respectively.The macro level causes of micro level food insecurity are evident in the FederalGovernment’s report on food security:Australia’s growing population, estimated to be 35 million in 2050, and growingper capita consumption (e.g. wheat consumption per capita has increased 55 percent since the 1970s) will also present a challenge for domestic food securitygiven the potential for increasing climate shocks and dwindling internationalstockpiles of commodities’ (PMSEIC, 2011:17).Less discussed at higher policy levels are the consequences of peak oil and the currentreliance of global agrifood systems on oil for fertiliser manufacture, food processingand long distance food distribution. Whereas many community groups (including thenational Transition Towns movement) have cited peak oil as one of the key reasons tore-localise the food system, to date, such calls have not been taken up in anysystematic way by national or regional governments, perhaps with the exception ofCuba, when it was subject to US trade and import sanctions and received less supportfrom Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.Responses to food insecurityDespite claims that there is an adequate supply of food to feed the world, there is analternative discourse that presents the causes of global hunger and food insecurity tobe the result of inadequate food supplies for a growing global population. Forproponents of this perspective, this leads to a call to increase the amount of foodgrown, through biological and chemical innovations such as genetic engineering andsynthetic fertilisers. Although unpopular with many in civil society, this viewpoint hasbeen embraced with some fervour in Australia, especially since the drive since the endof World War Two to raise agricultural production for export to global markets. Withinthe food security discourse, this approach rests on an assumption that increases in thevolume of food produced will result in less people experiencing hunger. This ideologyof scientific-driven productivism, although often critiqued, is commonly heard inAustralian policy circles (Lawrence, Richards and Lyons, 2012). For instance, theforeword of the Federal Government’s policy document on food security states, ‘globalfood security will demand the development and delivery of new technologies toincrease food production on limited arable land and without relying on increased waterand fertiliser use’ (PMSEIC, 2010: v). More controversially, in 2009, during the openingaddress of a think tank on Agricultural Productivity and Climate Change, the presidentof the Australian Academy of Science offered the following:Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 78