food security Archives - Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry – Film Screening Friday 8th December (Melbourne)

November 23, 2017 by Katie Johnston

AFSA, in conjunction with ORICoop are proud to present the heartfelt film: Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry. Produced by Robert Redford, Terrence Malick, & Nick Offerman and directed by Laura Dunn (The Unforeseen), this documentary is "a beautiful and poignant portrait of the changing landscapes and shifting values of rural America in the era of industrial agriculture, as seen through the eye of American novelist, poet, and activist, Wendell Berry".

As a special guest and pre-screening event, Charles Massy will discuss his groundbreaking new book, Call of The Reed Warbler. There will be an opportunity for Q & A with Charles, and copies of the book will be available for purchase on the night.

Join us for a night of discussion, learning and reflection around farming - in the past, the present and the future.

Watch the film trailer HERE.

TICKETS: $25, (AFSA & ORICoop Members $20).

(General admission tickets listed as "ORICoop Friends FRI" and AFSA Members listed as "AFSA Members FRI").

Post-film details TBC (we will be hitting up a local pub and would love to continue discussions after the film - we hope you'll join us!)

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.

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

October President’s Message

October 4, 2014 by

Greetings All,

It’s Fair Food Week

Fair Food Week is almost upon us, and what a fantastic week it promises to be! There are dozens of events celebrating the pleasure and values that food embodies for us all – check out the website www.fairfoodweek.org for an event near you. If there isn’t an event near you, create your own. Get inspiration from other events, create your own, and please share it on our website and Facebook page. It could be as simple as a shared meal with friends or local produce or plant a fruit tree.

Over the last few months I have spoken to hundreds of people about Fair Food and the week we celebrate it. The most common question was; what makes food fair? The answers varied enormously and reflected the wonderful diversity that is the fair food movement, but they can all be distilled into three basic groups that revolve around environmental, social and economic justice.

The concept of a ‘fair go’ resonates so deeply with Australians, that for many it is a visceral response and we equate the ‘fair go’ with natural justice. So it is a very healthy thing for the fair food movement to tackle the systemic issues of the food system from multiple directions simultaneously. The great variety of events demonstrates our resilience through diversity.

I would also suggest that it would be fair to say (pun intended) that a ‘fair go’ is the strongest of unifying themes in Australia. Give that Fair Food Week is deliberately centred around World Food Day, it is a great response to the local, national and global challenges to food sovereignty. Fair Food Week is truly thinking globally whilst acting locally.

Best regards and in solidarity,
Michael Croft

Our food — why so expensive?

August 13, 2014 by Russ Grayson

Story by Russ Grayson, August 2014

Our food is too cheap. We pay too little for our food...

I've heard this quite a few times from local food and sustainability types, and although I know they are trying to say that Australian farmers don't get sufficient financial return for their farm products, the statement reveals their lack of understanding of Australia's food value chain.

Their statement comes across as suggesting that paying higher prices for food would somehow enrich our farmers. This is nonsense. All it would likely enrich is our supermarkets, which is where most people obtain their food. One of the potential solutions to fair trade for Australian farmers is supermarkets paying them better and rejecting less of their farm production because they don't like the look of it.

But it's not all Coles and Woolworths' fault, says Australian entrepreneur, Dick Smith, who set up Dick Smith foods to promote Australian food producers. He says the discount selling of Aldi and Cosco, two foreign-owned supermarket chains which have something like seven percent of the Australian grocery market compared to around 75-80 percent held by the Coles/Woolworths duopoly, forces the duopoly to reduce costs and returns to Australian producers.

In proposing higher prices, the comment I mention above also disregards the large number in this country who experience varying degrees of food insecurity. Drawing on the 1995 Australian National Nutrition Survey and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework (2004-05), the Australian Institute for Family Studies identified who misses out on regular meals: 23% of unemployed people; 23% of single parent households; 20% of low income earners; 15% of young people; 20% percent of rental households and 24% of indigenous people. And the reason many miss out is that food is jettisoned when it comes to decisions on household expenditure because there are more pressing priorities. Making food more expensive would only worsen their situation.

Clearly, those sustainability and local food lovers would benefit from a more sophisticated approach to food pricing. Recently, I discovered a contribution to that on the News Ltd website. Entitled Why is food so expensive in Australia compared to other countries? and published on 14.07.14, the article put responsiblity partly in the saucepan of celebrity chefs and their TV shows as well as in the aisles of our supermarket duopoly.

First, the opener

But first, the article's opening paragraph: "AUSTRALIA grows its own fruit and vegetables, we produce some of the world’s best meat and we’re surrounded by seafood-rich oceans."

All true, but not the whole story. Sure, we produce fruit and vegetables but supermarket imports from low-wage, low-cost, low-food-safety-regulation countries like South Africa and New Zealand, which I include here because the kiwi's import food from who-knows-where, package it and slap a misleading 'made in NZ' label on it, then export it, are undermining that production. It's much the same for Australian fisheries, with cheap imports on unknown provenance swimming in from Asia.

We can see that this opening paragraph is simply too sweeping, too unnuanced, and as a scene-setter for the article it is somewhat misleading.

Celebrity chefs, celebrity prices

There's no denying that food is now entertainment. Just check out the plethora of TV cooking programs. The best of these educate about the traditions and cultures around food, the rest are pure entertainment.

So how much responsibility does the cult of the celebrity chef and the food-as-entertainment industry have for the price of food in Australia, the article asks?

Some, it turns out, mainly because they condition their audiences to pay high prices for food.

According to a woman quoted in the article, Brigit Busicchia, a PhD candidate studying the politics of food at Sydney's Macquarie University, when it comes to the cult of the celebrity chef and their TV shows...

" ...shoppers had also been influenced by shows such as MasterChef or My Kitchen Rules, which encouraged food cults and an acceptance of premium prices.
“Not only are these shows invitations to consume more but they also turn food into a form of entertainment, making us think about food and its value in a very different way".
Ms Busicchia said there was " ...more to food than just its commercial value, and inflating prices created problems for those on a tight budget."

Foodie TV shows and the phenomenon of the celebrity chef are, of course, nothing more than the creation of the entertainment and book publishing industries as they seek new markets to increase book and magazine sales and attract more viewers that they can on-sell to their advertisers as audience numbers.

The dangers of celebrity chefs to Australian producers was disclosed by the critical reaction of Australian horticulture industry body, Ausveg, to Jamie Oliver's advertising campaign for Woolworths. That led people who had been inspired by Oliver's earlier work in nutrition to see his alliance with Woolworths as a sellout, and farmers to balk at the Jamie Oliver Tax requested by Woolworths for every box of produce supplied to support their Jamie Oliver marketing campaign.

Readiness to pay

It's long been a perception about the organic food retail industry that pricing is based on the customer's willingness to pay rather than on production, distribution and retailing costs plus a profit percentage markup. This isn't limited to the food industry, of course.

While I don't believe this is a universal phenomenon — for example, my fortnightly box of mainly organic food sourced from farmers for the most part close to Sydney and supplied by Ooooby is competitively priced to what I would pay in retail venues — I have seen prices for some organic products that approach almost orbital heights and are clearly out of the range of less affluent people. Overpricing — it's called 'price gouging' in other industries — merely further cements organics in the perception that it has laboured from from years... that organics is for the affluent, the supermarket is for the rest of us.

The article suggests that this is no longer a phenomenon to do with organic food alone, and that the cult of the celebrity chef has much to do with that.

The supermarkets

The Economist Intelligence Unit's senior economist, John Ferguson, quoted in the article, said we need more competition in the supermarket industry rather than continued domination by the duopoly.

Former chief executive officer of Kelloggs ANZ, Jean-Yves Heude, is quoted as estimating that...

" ...shoppers are probably paying about 3-3.5 percent more for groceries due to the dominance of the two main supermarkets in Australia."

He says that our smaller population is a factor in this, reducing the economies of scale that combine with longer food transportation lengths to maintain the price of food. As for Australian wages an salaries, Mr Heude said that's a chicken-and-the-egg issue because prices could not be sustained if people did not have sufficient money to pay for them... " ...the cost of food ultimately had to be affordable for residents."

Reading the news.com.au article led me to discover Dick Smith's critique of the newcomers to Australia's supermarket industry — Aldi and Costco — and to discover the claims and counterclaims around the volume of Australian product they carry. Following that up will have to be for another time.

Do you believe food in Australia is too expensive?
What role do you believe celebrity chefs and foodie TV shows play in food prices?
What role do you believe the supermarket industries plays in maintaining high food prices?

Leave your response in the Comments box below this story.

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