Right to Food Archives - Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Baw Baw Food Security Coalition

September 15, 2017 by Tammi Jonas

"Food security is an individual or community’s ability to access healthy, affordable and appropriate food. Food insecurity can therefore be defined as having limited or irregular access to safe and secure nutritional food from a non-emergency source.

Food insecurity has been prioritised in the Central West Gippsland region in 2007. Subsequently, research and food system mapping was undertaken, which showed that the individuals found to be most affected by food insecurity in Central West Gippsland include the people on low incomes, older people, young people and people living in isolated areas. The result of this research was a Food Security Recommendation Report which was published in 2012 and provided guidance on the types of interventions that the CWGPCP and its partners could implement in order to tackle food insecurity. The Baw Baw Food Security Coalition was then developed to lead this work in the Baw Baw Shire."

Read more about the history and impact of the Baw Baw Food Security Coalition.

Towards increased diversity in our food supply

July 5, 2015 by Alana Mann

By Merran Laver. First published on www.southernharvest.net.au

Diversity in food production and supply is important in creating a resilient local food system.

There are many reasons to increase diversity in our food supply at a local level. One is to promote access to fresh, seasonal foods that consumers will choose to eat. Foods available locally have a reduced ecological footprint compared with those from the large-scale, conventional system upon which we’re all at least partly dependent. Another is our vulnerability due to reliance upon only a few crops.

This is a local as well as a global issue.

Simran Sethi, an environmental journalist from the US, discussed the recent global decrease in food diversity in an ABC Lateline interview. She talked about the vulnerability we’ve placed ourselves in by relying on a reduced number of crops: 75% of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants. This, Sethi believes, fits in with dominating agricultural enterprises that are based on crop monocultures. She stated that we need to increase diversity in our farming and that consumers also have a critical role by choosing to diversify their diets.

"Eating locally is a revolutionary act and I really don't want to sound trite about that but you know, this globalisation has happened in our lifetime. In 20 years we've seen the entire food system kind of upended and I think really the solution to this challenge is to start to think differently about how we grow food and how we consume and purchase food."

"It makes very little sense in some instances to procure food from faraway places. It increases the ecological footprint of that food, it increases greenhouse gas emissions of that particular food."

Many regions throughout Australia are undergoing fundamental shifts in diversifying their food supply and promoting local production to consumers. This is happening both in cities and in rural areas, and where these overlap, such as in the Southern Harvest Region, which incorporates the growing city of Canberra as well as smaller towns and communities surrounding the ACT.

Examples of how diversity in local food supply systems is increasing include: the growth of farmers markets and community gardens; promotion of encouraging people to grow their own produce; value-adding enterprises (eg small businesses, such as baked goods, juices, smoked meats/fish); farmers trying out new products for sale (cheeses/milk, different varieties of apple/pork/etc.).

These examples involve those who currently work to supply food to the population as well as the consumers who ultimately determine demand. As Sethi says,we need to "recultivate our relationships with local farmers and ensure that those relationships are strong and supported and in place, and the only way to do that is through consumer support".

Our diverse seasonal produce is sometimes showcased at local annual food festivals that are mushrooming all over the country; including the pumpkin festival at Collector, chestnut festival at Hoskinstown and cherry festival at Young, to name a few. These highlight and celebrate the production of particular foods during their harvest season, while bringing communities of producers and consumers together for a day each year. A quick scan of food annual festivals everywhere shows that diversity is one aspect that is also celebrated – both cultural and in relation to the produce.

Sustainable food initiatives that encompass this diversity are increasingly of interest to people who care about how and where their food is produced, and the increased security or resilience of their food supply. It is also of great interest to the producers of our food, some of whom are successfully venturing into products not traditionally grown in the region but suited to the climate – such as nuts, olives, herbs, truffles, saffron etc.

A current food production strategy for urban Victoria outlines how "Council and the community will work together on local food initiatives which enhance health, wellbeing and community connectedness, improve the environment and regenerate natural resources".

"An integrated response is called for to deliver better and more resilient food production models. This requires Council to form innovative partnerships with the community, local business, professional stakeholders and all levels of government."

The strategy also points to its community’s ‘rich diversity of food cultures’ and the increased biodiversity that can come from promoting local food growing.

Feeding Struggle Street: How Australia’s hidden hungry are deserted by our food system

May 17, 2015 by Alana Mann

There is an urgent need to address inequities in the current food system with evidence-based community food policies that ensure and protect peoples’ access to healthy, nutritious and culturally appropriate food.

The controversial SBS program Struggle Street, screened on Wednesday May 6, is a window into the lives of suburban residents in Sydney, now one of the most expensive cities in the world. In the food desert where the program is set major thoroughfares are festooned with the livery of McDonalds’, Hungry Jacks and KFC. A take-away sandwich or pre-made salad at the local service station is considered a treat; Coca-Cola and calorie-laden energy drinks are meal substitutes for children, teens and adults alike. Curried sausages top the menu choices at home.

Evidence of these poor diets is stark, ranging from malnutrition to obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

For the cast of Struggle Street and many other city dwellers access to fresh, healthy and affordable food - and especially fresh fruit and vegetables - is limited. Low-income residents stranded in food deserts have limited access to the transportation needed to perform household provisioning tasks such as grocery shopping. The small in-city grocers that improved neighbourhoods in low- to moderate-income housing areas have all but disappeared at the expense of a profit-driven supermarket duopoly.

Food insecurity is a daily challenge for families trying to survive on limited means, leading to increasing reliance on food charities.

According to last year’s Food Bank Hunger Report 516,000 Australians rely on food relief per month.

Thirty-five per cent of clients are children. Up to 60,000 people are turned away from the 2,500 charities that struggle to support them. Sixty per cent more food is needed to meet demand.

We are not alone. One in seven Americans now relies on a food bank and there are 1,000 operating in Germany. Feeding Britain (2014), a parliamentary inquiry into hunger in the UK, attributes the new ‘food bank movement’ to the inability of citizens to meet increasing costs of food, housing and utilities that outstrip growth in wages. Further, people lack the budgeting skills that might help them get by with less.

In Sydney, as in many other cities, social enterprises are doing their best to fill the gaps in food provisioning that governments do not. Food rescue charity Oz Harvest turns thousands of kilograms of waste food into meals for the most vulnerable everyday. The Wayside Chapel in Kings’ Cross has been feeding the lonely and destitute since 1964. The Chapel café provides a safe, relaxed environment for patrons to enjoy the dignity and sociability of purchasing and sharing a cheap meal. This sentiment also underpins the mission of Lentil as Anything, a non-profit restaurant chain in Melbourne and Sydney where customers pay what they can afford for a multicultural, communal dining experience that welcomes workers, refugees and the long-term unemployed.

These initiatives and a range of other urban food projects provide residents with food security, education, health and social benefits. Many are threatened by urban sprawl and rezoning of agricultural land; others struggle to continue due to lack of funding and reliance on volunteer labour. Research into their significant and genuine contribution to strengthening community food systems is needed.

Though comprehensive studies of food production on the peri-urban fringe of Sydney and farming in the Sydney Basin have been conducted there is a lack of data on urban food production and gaps in land use data for the City of Sydney. There is little information about who participates in local food networks and community gardens, and no measurement of quantities of produce. Few local councils have food policies, the exceptions being the Blue Mountains, Fairfield, Hawkesbury, the Illawarra region and Penrith.

In the City’s Strategic Vision for a Sustainable Sydney 2030 food systems are conspicuously absent.

Community food plans must take a whole-of-systems approach in mapping agricultural activities through developing a framework that enables us to understand and measure how these activities combine in ‘food flows’ that contribute health, social, economic and ecological benefits to residents of the city. Successful models include Ontario’s Local Food Act (2013), New York City’s Five Borough Farm Project (2012) and the City of Melbourne Food Policy, the planning of which began in 2011.

Projects with long-term vision to strengthen community food systems must measure the macronutrient content of these food flows, and determine how better access can be provided to city dwellers, and particularly the socio-economically marginalised. The formation of this policy must be systems-based, community-led and co-created to succeed.

Because hidden hunger is a public problem for which we are all responsible.

This post was originally published on the University of Sydney Environment Institute's 'Food, People and the Planet' web site.

Local food resilience – why is it important?

May 17, 2015 by Alana Mann

Story by Merran Laver, May 2015

As interest grows among consumers in sourcing their food from local producers, it is worth looking at resilience in the local food system as one of the many benefits.

The term resilience has roots in the Latin word resilio, which means to ‘jump back’¹; and broadly it is defined as a return to an original state. In a food context, resilience is the ability of a community to maintain a certain level of wellbeing by withstanding shocks or stressors to its food security.¹ Such impacts might be natural disasters, transportation problems, water shortages and other disturbances that can disrupt the supply of food being brought long distances from other regions or countries. To have at least some level of self-sufficiency in food production provides the local community with security if its broader food supply is disrupted.

A resilient local food system is one that promotes self-reliance and empowerment to provide for a community’s own food needs.²Food production, processing, distribution and consumption are integrated to benefit the overall health of a particular place – socially, economically, nutritionally and environmentally.

Inclusion of the word ‘community’ places an emphasis on strengthening existing, or developing new, relationships between all components of the food system.²

We can look to countries such as the United States for models of local food resilience, and where the literature on this topic is quite extensive. Again, often there is an emphasis on the community’s involvement in their food system. For example, an article from the US Community Food Security Coalition on what a ‘secure and resilient food system’ looks like refers to ‘a condition in which all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice’.³

Another US source⁴ refers to community food systems, the key features of which include equity, sustainability, self-reliance, empowerment, and individual and communal wellness. The authors provide a long list of what can be found in a ‘secure and resilient’ community food system, covering issues such as health promotion, business support and employment, consumption of seasonally available foods and strengthening of farm to community connections.

A potential and worthwhile aim of our own region’s food policy and planning is to create a resilient food system. The recent Discussion paper – Towards an ACT Region Food Policy and Food Plan – states that a ‘roadmap’ for all ACT food system stakeholders will be provided to ‘ensure that a resilient food system is achieved’.⁵ As well as setting a target for 30% of food consumption to be sourced from the ACT Region by 2030, the plan aims to create a resilient ACT food system by:

strengthening, and ensuring diversity within, the local food economy to protect the community against potential shocks to the system (eg oil or water shortages); and
ensuring food supplies are adequate, accessible, affordable and nutritionally balanced.⁵

Diversity in the food supply is important in the creation of a resilient local food system. The authors of the Discussion paper believe that: ‘By supporting this local food economy, the food cycle becomes increasingly more multifaceted and less reliant on one sole means of food supply, making the overall system much more resilient’.

References

Klein, Nicholls, and Thomalla 2003; Understanding Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security. http://www.ifpri.org/ghi/2013/understanding-resilience
E. Mane, L. Alinovi, D. Melvin 2010 Measuring resilience – A concept note. www.fao.org/docrep/013/al920e/al920e00.pHamm and Bellow; What Is Community Food Security? Community Food Security Coalition; Found at http://www.foodsecurity.org/views_cfs_faq.html
Hamm and Bellow; What Is Community Food Security? Community Food Security Coalition; Found at http://www.foodsecurity.org/views_cfs_faq.html
Eames-Sheavly, M., J. Wilkins. A Primer on Community Food Systems: Linking Food, Nutrition and Agriculture, In Discovering the Food System: an experiential learning program for young and inquiring minds. Cornell University, Department of Nutritional Sciences and Department of Horticulture. Found at http://www.discoverfoodsys.cornell.edu/primer.html
Discussion Paper: Towards an ACT Region Food Policy and Food Plan March 2015

Merran Laver is a freelance writer/editor with an interest in food, nutrition and health. Contact Merran: merran_laver@fastmail.fm

This article is reprinted with permission of Southern Harvest, the regional food organisation for the Australian Capital region - www.southernharvest.net.au

A gross infringement of food sovereignty and basic rights

April 26, 2015 by Food Sovereignty

Media release 26 April 2015

The Western Australian Government’s proposed closure of remote Aboriginal communities

The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), supported by the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA), express our strongest opposition to the forced removal of Aboriginal peoples from their communities, as proposed by the Western Australian government.

Such a removal would infringe fundamental human rights, and further diminish the food sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Government in breach of obligations

ABS data released this week indicates that more than one in five Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people live in a household which had run out of food and was unable to buy more, a rate of food insecurity six times higher than the rest of the Australian population. AFSA supports the combined call by the Public Health Association of Australia, Red Cross and Dietitians Association of Australia for increased resourcing of nutrition and food supply strategies to respond to this crisis.

This appalling rate of food insecurity shows that our Federal and state governments are in breach of their obligations to ensure that all Australians, and especially the most disadvantaged, enjoy the fundamental human right to adequate and culturally appropriate food, guaranteed by Article 10 of the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Australia is a signatory to that Covenant and has ratified it. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples outlines a range of rights of indigenous peoples which would be contravened by the forced removal of Aboriginal peoples from their communities and lands.

We believe it is a fundamental and ongoing act of reconciliation, respect and celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their culture that as a nation we support their right to remain on their traditional lands. This is where they are able to maintain the crucial relationships to the land, animals, plants, and ancestral and spiritual beings.

We acknowledge also that language, culture, spirituality, health and wellbeing and nutritional and medicinal knowledge are inextricably linked to peoples’ traditional lands and are strengthened, deepened and replenished by being on their traditional lands.

In Western Australia, dispossession continues

The history of colonisation of Australia demonstrates that when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are removed from their traditional lands there is a loss of skills and knowledge of the nutritional, medicinal and spiritual properties of traditional foods and the language to describe them. These processes of removal constitute a form of cultural genocide. It is unacceptable for this to happen yet again.

In the historical frame of the last 230 years, the current proposal by the WA government to remove basic services and infrastructure support from some remote Aboriginal communities is, whatever the rhetorical and ‘pragmatic’ justifications, yet another dispossession of both people, and the country to which they belong and owe the duty of custodianship.

With rapidly declining soil health and water availability in Australia, the living bank of sustainable land management knowledge held by Aboriginal people who have been able to maintain their language, culture and connection to country is an irreplaceable resource, not just to the people themselves, but to the whole nation. The impacts on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ lives that have occurred through colonisation mean that remaining knowledge and skills are vulnerable to loss. Closing remote Aboriginal communities would all but guarantee that loss.

Should the Western Australian government proceed with the closure of remote communities it would set a disturbing precedent for the denial by governments of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders rights across Australia to remain on their traditional lands. Such action would also have broader implications for infrastructure in rural and remote areas of Australia particularly regarding critical issues such as road maintenance and health services which are shared by all.

A better way forward

What is required of our governments are responses to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples human rights which are driven not by governments but by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people themselves.

AFSA calls on the Western Australian government to confirm that no remote Aboriginal communities will be stripped of essential service and infrastructure supports.

The reoccurring failures of governments to adequately and consistently respect and uphold Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights to food sovereignty and food security is reflected in the lack of national, coordinated policy, funding and practice regarding food sovereignty and food security.

We call on governments at all levels to come together as a matter of urgency to develop in collaboration with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations and communities, health and community sector peak bodies and other key stakeholders, a policy framework, funding commitments and national action plan for food sovereignty and food security.

...........

About the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance and food sovereignty

The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is working towards a fair, diverse and democratic food system for the benefit of all Australians. We are a civic organisation of Australian producers, communities, organisations and individuals committed to upholding the rights of peoples to food sovereignty.

Food sovereignty asserts the right of peoples to nourishing and culturally appropriate food produced and distributed in ecologically sound and ethical ways and their right to collectively determine their own food and agriculture systems.

The degree to which peoples experience food sovereignty has a direct bearing on their food security. Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. The greater peoples’ food sovereignty, the greater the level of control they have over their food choices and the sources of their food.

Contact:

Clare Richards, National Committee member for North Australia, Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance:

Mobile: 0409 944 136
Email: clare@clareskitchen.com

Michael Moore, CEO, Public Health Association of Australia:

Mobile: 0417 249 731

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