Urban solutions to drought-induced food price increase

According to the Alliance, if drought pushes up urban food prices significantly it will be financially vulnerable families that suffer, people who already find difficulty in buying a sufficient quantity of nutritious foods - people who constitute the “hidden hunger” that exists in Australia’s suburbs.

As well as benefits to regional economy and nutritional health, the other reason why a regional supply of food is important is because transport from grower to eater is less than foods trucked in from further afield - fewer food miles or embodied energy - and there is lower emission of greenhouse gases.

It is the value of urban fringe farming to the food security of our cities that necessitates state government action to ensure the future viability of the industry. Now, more than ever, urban food production is a strategic planning issue of the utmost importance, but are state parliaments listening and are they capable of reading the signs?

Growing in the city

Urban fringe farming is not the only type of agriculture increasing the food security of our cities. Home vegetable, fruit and poultry production remain a diminished but still popular suburban activity, as television gardening programs and a substantial nursery, publishing and education industry that has grown around it indicate. Considering its importance to household nutrition, home growing of food might best be regarded as “garden agriculture”.

Government agriculture departments do not collect statistics or research home garden productivity on a sustained basis because production is for the consumption of growers and their families. Government fails to recognise home food production as an economic activity, regarding it as a hobby. It is better regarded as part of the household economy rather than either a hobby or a commercial activity.

Despite government disregard, home food production remains an economic activity of considerable scale. We know this from a 1992 report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) which disclosed that home fruit production in Australia totalled 110,000 tonnes, vegetable production was 153,000 tonnes, nut production 1,541 tonnes, domestic meat poultry totalled 2,000 tonnes, egg production 26.1 million and the volume of beer brewed, 39.8 million litres. The survey found that recreational fishing, a wild harvest that can contribute to household food security, amounted to 31,000 tonnes.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no more recent research although Andrea Gaynor reported on home production in her book, Harvesting the Suburbs (2006; University of Western Australia Press, Crawley WA).

Over the past 30 years, especially since the mid-1990s, food production on public open space in community food gardens has offered urban dwellers without a home garden the opportunity to become producers rather than just consumers of part of their food supply.

The productivity of community gardens varies tremendously, with perhaps the most productive found on housing estates in Carlton, Flemington and Fitzroy in Melbourne, all projects supported by Cultivating Community, a community-based organisation providing assistance in the form of community garden development and food co-operatives to Department of Human Services estate residents.

Like home gardening, there is little research available on the production of food in community gardens, in part, again, because the activity is regarded as a hobby rather than a productive undertaking that contributes to household economies.

This is to make the error of equating food production with the unproductive gardening of ornamental plants - it is the end use of gardening activities that differentiate them and distinguish their relevance and utility in a country gripped by drought and consequent food price increases.

In addition, any evaluation of community gardens would have to take into take into account their role in the development of the social capital of neighbourhoods.