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Food Policy Council

Concerned community members and agencies call for the formation of an independent
Food Policy Council (FPC) with state-wide responsibility.

The Food Policy Council is to be responsible for implementing the following recommendations.

Recommendations:

The Hungry for Change Food Summit calls on the New South Wales government to adopt an integrated whole of government approach to planning around food systems.

1. Plan for food

1.1. All policy areas need to place a priority on the food system to enable provision of a safe, adequate, culturally appropriate and affordable food supply.
1.2. Water policy needs to ensure equitable and sustainable access for food production and ecosystems.
1.3. Minimise and recycle food and food production waste.
1.4. Empower and resource local governments to support regional food systems.
1.5. Listen, involve and achieve solutions with communities, including those seldom heard, such as
indigenous Australians.

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2. Ensure sustainable food production and distribution systems

2.1. Protect rural and urban land for sustainable food production.
2.2. Ensure resource management strategies are focused on protecting and retaining the economic viability
of sustainable food production.
2.3. Reward food producers for growing local and sustainable food, including organic.
2.4. Ensure food producers receive a fair and equitable return for their produce.
2.5. Develop and support structures and strategies that encourage local food distribution systems.

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3. Secure Access to Good Food for All

3.1. Support strategies for affordable, healthy and safe food for all.
3.2. Resource creative, local initiatives in sustainable food production and distribution.
3.3. Provide targeted support for disadvantaged groups to access good food.

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4. Safeguard Future Food and Future Health

4.1. Reduce the ecological footprint of food production and distribution.
4.2. Drive corporate and social responsibility within the food systems.
4.3. Support appropriate technology, training and workforce development for the food system.
4.4. Apply precautionary principles to the adoption of new technologies in the food system.
4.5. Develop and support regional food enterprise.
4.6. Public food procurement contracts and accreditation guidelines predominantly require quality,
wholesome food.

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5. Ensure quality food in society

6. Include information on food and food systems in both school education and community-based programs.

7. Food labelling and marketing support healthy and sustainable food choices.

8. Celebrate cultural and social aspects of food diversity.

9. Protect and retain the landscape value and environmental services of agricultural land for health and social amenity.

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Executive Summary

Food security has never been so critical to the future of civilisation.  Localised and regional food systems counter balance globalisation and play a strategic role in community health and security.  [Agriculture Today, NSW DPI July 2008]

Food security refers to the ability of individuals, households and communities to acquire appropriate and nutritious food on a regular and reliable basis, and using socially acceptable means. [NSW Centre for Public Health Nutrition. Food Security Options Paper: A planning framework and menu of options for
policy and practice interventions. 2003.]

Today, the food system faces unprecedented pressure including extended drought, climate
change, peak oil, pressure on fertile periurban and agricultural lands, loss of agricultural skills
and knowledge.

In addition, there are significant barriers to accessing good food for all, specifically inadequate income support and transport. Innovative approaches by communities, government and industries to address these issues
need support.

We call on the NSW government to respond to widespread community concern about the
future of our food security and to initiate a partnership with non-government
organisations, local governments, business and community to develop a comprehensive
and integrated food strategy, together with policies to implement the strategy, based on
the following principles.

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Principles:

1. All people have the right to adequate amounts of safe and nutritious food to promote and maintain health without the need for emergency food relief.
2. Provision of healthy food needs to be valued and planned — it cannot be left to market forces alone.
3. All levels of government must consider the impact of their policies on food systems.
4. Policies on income, employment, housing, health and transport should incorporate food access.
5. Permanent protection of fertile agricultural land is fundamental to good planning.
6. The need to conserve essential ecosystem services, especially biodiversity, soil and water.
7. Minimise the carbon footprint of food production, transport, manufacture, storage and distribution; reuse and recycle waste
8. Innovative strategies that ensure food security and sustainable food systems are to be priorities of government and communities
9. New technologies to be approved only following thorough testing and assessment against a sustainability and health impact framework.

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Statement of case

Most Australians have not had to worry about our food supply in recent history and have had
little awareness of those who do.

In NSW today, the Murray-Darling Basin, which produces a third of Australia’s food supply, is
in a critical state due to water shortages from less rainfall and mismanagement. Climate
change and peak oil pose increasing and unknown threats to agricultural production, here and
overseas.

Demand for land for housing is putting the squeeze on agricultural land in the Sydney Basin,
and close to other cities, potentially limiting the future supply of fresh food to cities and
undermining our farming communities.  50% of NSW vegetable farms are in the Sydney Basin
and 50% of these are in areas designated for urban expansion.

Chronic disease, which has strong links to diet, accounts for about two thirds of the annual
Australian health budget, and likewise health costs represent an increasingly high percentage
of the entire NSW state budget.

In recent times, food in Australia has been relatively cheap and today we spend a lower
proportion of our total income on food today compared to even 30 years ago. Conversely,
over a million Australians experience food insecurity, meaning they frequently do not have
enough money for food or have to buy cheap and unhealthy food.

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NSW Department of Primary Industries

All citizens need to be educated about the complex systems that ensure an ongoing supply of healthy food, the real
costs of production and how to safeguard a sustainable healthy future food supply.

Urban agriculture needs to be considered as a strategic contributor to dealing with peak oil, global warming, the increasing occurrence of natural disasters, urban and city ecosystems, landscapes and designs, along with bio-security, pandemics, food terrorism, and water and waste cycles. Today, establishing food bowls is essentially about bottom line commodity development. Embedding local food production, processing, distribution and consumption into urban communities can play a significant part in achieving sustainable food security. This approach is consumer and community driven – not producer or supermarket driven – food
culture.

Food security has never been so critical to the future of civilisation.

…Agriculture Today, July 2008

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The community speaks: SFFA Regional Forum reports

The NSW Food Summit represents the culmination of a process of six forums held across five
regions across the greater Sydney region.

Over 650 participants from diverse organisations in the Blue Mountains, Illawarra, Central Coast, Central Sydney and Illawarra have participated, as speakers focussed on key food system issues for their region.

Each forum was tasked with developing a statement of issues to take forward to NSW Food Summit in October.

Reports from the Forums are the actual summary points put forward by the Forum participants, summarised by the local organisers.  Minimal changes have been made to modify the actual wording. Actual reports from the forums are at:  www.sydneyfoodfairness.org.au
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Food Policy Council

Concerned community members and agencies call for the formation of an independent
Food Policy Council (FPC) with state-wide responsibility.

The FPC to comprise representatives of local and state government, citizens, community and non-government
organisations, agrifood industries, primary producers, education sector, business and
those responsible for short and long term planning.

Expertise on the FPC to include:

• health, social justice, ecological sustainability, research, planning, agriculture, food
• systems, innovation, business, economics and governance.

The Food Policy Council to be responsible for:

• ensuring integrated, cross-government planning around food systems
• ensuring sustainable and safe food production systems that are viable for producers
• ensuring good food for all
• safeguarding future food and future health
• valuing and celebrating quality food in society.

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DOWNLOAD the Declaration of the Hungry for Change Food Summit

The talk, held in the seminar room of DLA Phillip Fox on level 38 of a CBD office building, was one of a series put on by the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO). In retrospect, it was a worthwhile offering but it could have been done better.

Lynn Saville from the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance was first off. Lynn played a leading role in creating the Hawkesbury Food System some years ago and presently serves as a councillor on Willoughby Council over on the northside. She presented the case for maintaining Sydney’s urban fringe market gardens in the face of a growing urbanisation being doggedly pursued by the development industry and its fellow travelers, the NSW Labor government.

Predictable in a way, Aaron Gadriel from the development industry lobby, the Urban Taskforce, played down the value of Sydney’s urban fringe market gardens although he said that he could not foresee the complete disappearance of farming from the region. His talk, however, failed to address potential future challenges such as the peaking of the global oil supply and its price-inflating impact on food costs and availability, or climate change and the increased potential of the eastern coastal plain in food production and the relation of urban growth to that.

Nor did he mention the economic value of the regional food industry to the city economy or the potential for this to be increased through maintaining city fringe farmland for agriculture in perpetuity. The idea of viable local economies was absent as Aaron promoted the value of big farms, claiming that small market gardens were unviable. His was very much a business as usual formula.

What was disappointing was that NSW Agriculture speaker, David Mason, who has been the department’s urban agriculture officer, did not discard his Powerpoint and address Aaron’s points. Instead, we got a far-too-hurried series of word and number-laden Powerpoint images flashed momentarily on the screen, far too rapidly for comprehension. Opportunity lost.

Can do better

The author and educator, Edward de Bono, says that the best criticism includes suggestions as to what could have been done better. So as someone who has been influenced by de Bono’s work, let me have a go. I’ll put my ideas together in three packages. Here goes…

Package #1 — bettering a bad format

What we, the audience, got from what could have been an engaging discussion was a sequence of three largely disconnected presentations in which Powerpoint-based information, not the ideas of the presenters, was the driver. It was as if the presenters had to get out what they planned to say rather than improvise by responding to what previous speakers had said.

These were content-driven presentations and they suffered as such presentations must.  When Angela Garber coined the popular term, “death by Powerpoint”, what she was getting at was this type of presentation. Powerpoint, after all, was coded to be an aid, not the main way to convey information. That is done through the speakers’ brain and mouth working together.

This was the type of seminar in which the presenters could have been instructed not to present, in which Powerpoint could have been discarded entirely. That is to say, in some situations having a series of speakers get up there one after another and do their scheduled presentation is an idea that is now… how do I say this?… suboptimal? …tired?.

Instead, this was the type of seminar in which a hosted conversation would have allowed something to have been done which was not done — the exploration of the speakers’ ideas and values. Rather than a Powerpoint-driven infodump of far-too-many facts and figures, a conversation guided by a leader to keep it to topic and on time would have been a far more engaging format. The audience would have walked away with more.

Why is this conventional approach all-far-too-often found in seminars tired? Because it is based on the old paradigm that says there are givers of presentations and there are recipients and they are separate species. This is one-way communication, a product of the industrial age, of the old university, the old media, of the superseded business model… so last century, as they say. It is, as US academic, communications and intellectual property commentator and author, Lawrence Lessig puts it, “read only” communication that requires a receptive and passive audience that… well, just sits there and opens its mouth only in the allocated time slot, which is usually far too short.

I’m not saying that the conventional seminar does not have a place anymore, just that we need more diversity in information delivery. The old approach ignores the reality that digital communications has made ours a read-write culture, that this is now the cultural reality that organisations of all kinds often lag far behind. Those formerly known as ‘the audience’ can be co-creators in a conversation that offers a collective wisdom.

Package #2 — the images

How do I sum up kindly and inoffensively, trying not to upset them, the visual style of the presenters’ Powerpoint images? Let me just say that their images were crammed full of sometimes superfluous information that was off-topic. The only exception to this, on occasion, was Aaron Gadriel’s images.

Here’s what I am trying to say on a kindly way — the presenters presented:

• no road map or lead image to encapsulate and summarise the main points they were about to make
• no end image to reiterate their main points and tie the presentation together
• far, far too many words per image
• more than one idea per image
• no photographic, video or sound bites — just words words words — no diversity
• irrelevant image content more to do with organisational history and background rather than sticking to the topic of the day — food security; this resulted in a squandering of time that would have been better used to make the speakers’ points
• too many, far too many bulleted lists, like this one.

These things are educationally unsound as well as displaying ignorance of the visual presentation of information and the cognitive processes related to the use of Powerpoint. That is, making information available in a form that people can easily use.

What I am saying is that the presenters ignored Golden Rule #1 of information design when using Powerpoint and similar software. And Golden Rule #2 it is this — less is more. Don’t write a dissertation when a couple words or an image will do. This has been more than adequately explored in Garr Reynolds well-regarded books on the visual design of information delivery and on making presentations.

Powerpoint images do not convey knowledge and ideas — the presenter does. It comes forth from his or her mouth, which, for the occasion, should be firmly plugged into his or her brain. In other words, the presenter should know their stuff and not rely on the poor prop of Powerpoint, which was designed as an aid to presenting, not as a substitute for the presenter.

Package #3 — the presentations

In their book, Making It Stick, brothers Dan and Chip Heath offer ideas of what makes messages stick in the brain, ideas derived from research carried out as part of their work (see Amazon review). This should be essential reading for all who get up and make public presentations, as should the books of Garr Reynolds, mentioned above, for those using Powerpoint.

Had the Heath brothers been read, then the speakers would have insinuated something completely missing from their presentations: emotion. Emotion as an initial reaction is hardwired into the human psyche and irrespective of the intellectual twaddle peddled by those who would see humans as mere molecular machines, it trumps objectivity. Emotion can be one of the most effective means of emphasising important points.

A speaker who shows passion for their topic via emotion is a speaker who enthuses. One who stands and reads or who just churns out verbiage without any body movement, without any change of tone and pitch and volume or any other display of evident enthusiasm is behaving like a verbal tranquiliser. Their information will come across as such.

Facts and figures populated the seminar’s Powerpoint images so plentifully that their effect was lost, as was the effect of creating a sense of credibility for the information that is so important to gaining audience confidence in making presentations. It was a case of fact and figure overdose, and like and drug overdose it disrupted the normal capacity of the brain to make sense of the world. All of that important quantitive information was lost in the dense verbiage of text that occupied the slides corner-to-corner.

The future

The EDO offers a valuable service in their public seminar series and my critical comments are offered merely as suggestions to improve this. Likewise, food security, the topic of the seminar, is something that is going to be very important in our and our childrens’ future.

The seminar brought together different interests, opposing interests, and could have been the forum in which these differences and the ideas and values they are based upon could have been explored in a calm and enlightening manner free of the polarisation they engender as discussions in the political or media sphere. What we got was, in effect, a series of position statements that, interesting and clarifying that might have been, did not dig into the issues to any depth as could have a conversation.

Nonetheless, thanks to the EDO for taking the initiative to organise these talks.

THE PLAINS TO PLATE FOOD CONVERGENCE is over but its effects linger in the minds of those inspired by it and by the people it attracted. Those effects hang there in the mind to spur discussion, collaboration and the creation of new ideas and initiatives.

So, what were my main observations about Plains To Plate? Here’s the trends I discern:

1. There is an incipient move towards developing food policy at the local government level, stimulated now by the fervour evident at Plains To Plate and, late last year, by the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance’s Hungry For Change Food Summit. This has the potential to link to the idea of a national food policy recently promoted by Queensland horticulture industry body Growcom and the Public Health Association of Australia, however the formulation of a food policy cannot be left to an industry body or to a health association alone. There must be a significant role for popular organisations. A recent development has been the Tasmanian government’s move towards developing a food policy although what we can expect from such government-led development remains to be seen.
2. Some local governments in South Australia are active, or plan to become so soon, in the development of policy around community food gardening, itself just one part of the broader community food system. This parallels the development of local government enabling policy for community gardening in NSW, particular in Sydney, in which I have not been an innocent bystander. A concern expressed was that the interest in community gardens by professional health and community workers may place unrealistic expectations on community gardening which is a voluntary, minimally funded activity.
3. Just as animals and plants increase in number and adapt to different situations by diversifying and speciating, so has there been an acceleration in the rate of community food system start-ups and in their number of species these past few years. This can be expected to continue.
4. There is now sufficient commonality of interest and compatibility of agendas between community organisations, academics and some local governments to create a nexus of shared ideas that could form the basis for creative partnerships and the furthering of the search for solutions to our food issues.
5. It is quite evident that there is now a national, social movement around food that is rapidly evolving. It involves a mixed milieu of academics, local government and community organisations. It is not as yet a cohesive movement but the foci and agendas of the food-focused organisations that are interested are probably compatible enough for a broad agreement about what to do to ensure food security, affordable, viable regional food systems and ready access to fresh food and to coalesce around.

The forum to discuss the food declaration was an exercise in deliberative democracy.

That people are thinking this way was evident in the informal conversation at the Food Convergence. Some raised the idea that the time may be approaching when the local and state-based food issues organisations might gain a louder and more influential voice through a representative national organisation. This would be stimulated if proposals for a national food policy by industry and the health sector were to gain traction in Canberra. The time for a national approach might not be now, however it may be soon. What would be necessary would be to ensure that citizen groups and community-based NGOs were well represented on a national body, otherwise it may come to be dominated by professional farming or health interests and so be seen as elitist by community food organisations.

What I think was significant was how Plains To Plate brought together, in an open and collegial conversation space, social innovators working in community food systems, academics and staff from state and local government

The number and quality of orgnisations addressing what is a broad range of topics to do with our food system was evident among the 750 or so attendees of Plains To Plate over its four days. And this in only a single state of the Commonwealth; a similar coalition of the willing around food could be anticipated in most other states. With some local governments active in this social and cultural melange, at least in South Australia and NSW, there exists the potential for constructive, collaborative and positive arrangements to evolve.

This is the second food forum on this scale to include a strong citizen group component and to bring together otherwise divergent organisations around the common theme of food security, access, affordability, quality and regional food systems. In many ways Plains To Plate was the natural complement to the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance’s Hungry For Change Food Summit of October last year, although the buzz at the events was quite different. I anticipate more such gatherings and find them valuable for defining commonalities of interest, the potential for collaboration and, perhaps, alliance building. Such things will be necessary to building an influential presence on the metropolitan, state and national levels.

Trio of speakers enlivens opening night

Food Connect Foundation's Robert Pekin and South Australian Farmers' Federation chief executive, Carol Vincent, spoke at the Food Summit.

Like bacteria in a petrie dish, ideas and inspiration quickly propagated to fill the four days of the event. Inspiration was born on the first evening at the opening forum in the Hawke Centre of the University of South Australia where chef and author, Gay Bilson, Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network South Australia (ACFCGN) co-ordinator and community garden researcher, claire nettle, Grahame Brookman from the Food Forest — a mixed, commercial farm in the drier country north of Adelaide, designed and managed according to the principles of Permaculture design — addressed a hall of almost 400 people.

Gay, a woman in middle age with close-cropped hair and plastic-rimmed glasses, described how she has been influenced by the writings of Wendel Berry and went on to relate three short stories about food from her recent visit to Kerala, India. She also invited people to help themselves to the box of apples and grapes she had brought with her.

claire nettle (lower case is her preference), a young, neat-looking woman who sits on the national executive team of the ACFCGN, addressed the theme of grassroots initiatives for food justice, a topic derived no doubt from her doctoral research. She took us through the plethora of community food initiatives from farmers’ markets to food swaps.

Fortunately, Grahame Brookman’s Powerpoint presentation malfunctioned and this became the spur to an entertaining verbal address that laced serious messages with a buttering of humour. Clearly excited about his topic, a slim and fit-looking Grahame, trimmed grey beard matching his fringe of hair, spoke of population growth, telling the audience that the topic of Australia’s population should become a public conversation. A changing climate and an ailing Murray-Darling system, he said, may eventually make the Murray agricultural lands largely unavailable to agriculture other than for a pastoralism based on kangaroos and fat-tailed sheep.

Joel Catchlove of Friends of the Earth South Australia, was one of the organisers of Plains To Plate.

On tour

Ridley Grove… Woodville High School… Common Ground… St Andrews… Fern Avenue… names probably unfamiliar to people who live beyond South Australia’s borders, but names that figure prominently among the 40 to 50 community food gardens and school kitchen gardens in Adelaide. It was some of these that the Plains To Plate tour visited in what turned out to be a full day on the road.

Alan Shepherd, who recently paid a visit to Sydney to look at community gardens, coordinates the Ridley Grove and two other Adelaide community gardens where he provides support and educational services. Common Ground is a community garden in containers on asphalt, not far from the city centre. Fern Avenue is a large, spacious and neat community garden with a rendered strawbale building housing its office, kitchenette, library and meeting space. Behind, two large, plastic rainwater tanks harvest the fall from the sloping roof to help the garden make it trough Adelaide’s parching summers.

Fern Avenue Community Garden in Fullarton, once the site of a jam factory that grew its fruit in orchards where surrounding houses now stand, offered an extra attraction. Adelaide is blessedly free of fruit fly, so its inhabitants can enjoy big, grub-free and tasty purple figs. So it was perhaps not surprising to find local Permaculture educator, Chris Day and Jennifer Alden, CEO of Melbourne agency Cultivating Community, lurking below the fig trees and reaching up into the foliage to extract the fruits to not-so-surrupticiously munch on them.

Speakers and workshops bring inspiration aplenty

Lolo Houbein signs copies of her book, One Magic Square, at Plains To Plate. Lolo's book metricises the 'square foot gardening' model and applies it to Australian conditions.

Speakers over the next two days were so inspirational and numerous it is impossible to name all of them. They covered a broad table of topics ranging through community food systems, government food initiatives and sustainability programs. What I think was significant was how Plains To Plate brought together, in an open and collegial conversation space, social innovators working in community food systems, academics and staff from state and local government. Interesting was the number of local government staff working on community garden policies and the one or two starting on food policies.

A highlight of the event was the launch of Food Connect Adelaide, an adaptation of the community supported agriculture model.

Plains To Plate will issue a declaration of food as did the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance’s Food Summit last year. The final official event was a forum where ideas about the declaration were raised and discussed. People had earlier listed their ideas on a wall poster. This mini-exercise in deliberative democracy brought a good feel to wind up Plains To Plate.

The day after the Plains To Plate Food Summit, the South Australian team of the ACFCGN launched Growing Community – starting and nurturing community gardens, their new book. That took place at Glandore Community Garden, a newish garden stimulted by ACFCGN local coordinator, Kate Hubmeyer, who works for the local government as well as at the Black Forest primary school kitchen garden, probably Australia’s oldest at 27 years.

One thought that occurred to me in speaking with the varied groups at the Food Convergence was the focus of sustainability, of the campaigns and organisations around it, is quickly shifting to food. Why this is so is hinted at in Melbourne University’s Victorian Eco Innovation Lab’s report, Sustainable and Secure Food Systems for Victoria, in which the researchers disclose the centrality of food choices to energy consumption and production, water use and to the generation of wastes.

Harvesting ideas for the food declaration via a wall poster. People added their suggestions to a list of topics.

In a way, this trend to a focus on the centrality of food as a means of achieving positive environmental and social outcomes to some extent marginalises those older environment groups whose sole focus has been the natural environment. I do not belittle them — they played a significant historic role through the development of environmentalism. Now, however, our better understanding of environment and society, the natural and the human, and the more recent realisation that these entities are part of the same complex adaptive system rather than the old and tired viewpoint that sees humanity as somehow separate from the environment of which it is a natural expression, has moved on the conversation about how we move to sustainability. The dialogue at Plains To Plate hinted at this.

If Plains To Plate truly is an indicator of a growing focus on food systems — those varied structures that bring us our sustenance via food supply chains — and I believe that Plains To plate is this — it builds on the momentum started by the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance’s Food Summit of late 2009.

Where these events lead remains unknown, however it is certain that they have stimulated an incipient movement that is at last seriously addressing food security, sustainable food production, accessible and affordable food and that has started to bring together those sectors in society that are all-too-often alien to each other — citizens and their organisations, local and to a limited extent state government and academics.

Plains To Plate was organised by the South Australian team of Friends of the Earth. It took place at the University of South Australia’s Hawke Centre in the city.

Plains To Plate social networking Ning

AROUND A DOZEN PEOPLE are walking the long, straight footway through Hyde Park where the lines of overaching native figs form a vegetative tunnel. They pass Francois Sicard’s Archibald Fountain, opened in 1932 with its classical, sculptured figures and animals that spray water skywards. Exiting the park, they enter Macquarie Street and make their way to an old sandstone building with a long verandah. Here, they are to hand over the state’s first Declaration on Food.

The delegation includes visiting food advocate, Jeanette Longfield MBE, who is co-ordinator of the UK’s national food education and advocacy organisation, Sustain.

…a regional food future that is, in part, based on access to local, fresh food produced by city fringe farmers on land zoned agricultural in pepetuity, using sustainable farming methods and receiving a good financial return for their product…

Sustain UK's Jeanette Longfield MBE (right) with food journalist, Joanna Savill.

A brief ritual follows during which the Sydney Food Fairness Alliances’ (SFFA) Catriona Macmillan hands the Declaration to state parliamentarians including Ian Cohen, MLA (The Greens) and Paul Pearce MP (Labor). ABC radio records the proceedings and speaks to Jeanette Longfield, who was a keynote speaker at the SFFA’s Food Summit, of which production of the Declaration was the last day’s activity.

The Declaration will be mentioned in Parliament and entered into Hansard. Contained in its pages are ideas for a sustainable food supply and for equitable access to food, among other topics. Hopefully, it will also form the basis for an ongoing program by the SFFA and others for a regional food future that is, in part, based on access to local, fresh food produced by city fringe farmers on land zoned agricultural in pepetuity, who receive a good financial return for their product and who make use of sustainable farming methods.

The ceremony marks the culmination of the Sydney Food Fairness Alliances’ (SFFA) Hungry For Change, a Food Summit itself the culmination of a series of Summit lead-up events that have taken place over the previous months. Those lead-up events had packed the Sydney Customs House (the inner-urban, Inner West and Eastern Suburbs event) and attracted people to regional gatherings in the Blue Mountains, Macarthur region, Illawarra and Central Coast.

Signifying food‘s importance in a world in change

Sustain's Jeanete Longfield's participation in Hungry For Change was entertaining and inspiring.

The fact that Jeanette Longfield was awarded an MBE for services to food policy in the 2007 New Years Honors List signifies that food and the growing number of issues around its production, supply and consumption is a topic whose time has well and truly come.

Sustain involves itself in similar work to the SFFA but has been in existence much longer and its program is more ambitious. It’s probably no secret that some in the SFFA would like their organisation to eventually acquire the same status that Sustain enjoys.

A petite woman whose blonde hair shows off a newly acquired Australian suntan, on the first day of the Summit Jeanette had stood on the stage in the auditorium at the Teachers’ Federation Convention Centre dressed in a bright floral frock. Hers was a light, animated and sometimes humourous presentation during which she told the audience that the adoption of a food policy does not always lead to action by government.

Listing cities that already have food policies (London, Vancouver, Toronto), she described London’s food strategy as “really good” and told the audience that London’s previous lord mayor, Ken Livingstone, had also been “really good” and the new Lord Mayor of London had surprised many with his interest in a viable food system. She said that Sydney is fortunate to have a lord mayor like Clover Moore who has an interest in simulating a sustainable food supply for the city.

Jeanette mentioned an innovative, City of London project to expand the area of the City devoted to food production — a plan to identify 2012 new community food growing spaces by 2012.

Jeanette said a high level political support is crucial in advocating a more safe and secure food system and that support from a mayor or deputy mayor was advantageous.

Clover champions local food

The Sydney Food Fairness Alliance's Food Summit was opened by the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore.

Opening the Hungry For Change Food Summit, Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore (Independent), started by pointing out facts about Sydney’s food system.

“Eighty percent of NSW’s food comes form the Sydney Basin. The region is 30 percent more productive that farmland in the rest of NSW. The Sydney Basin has a more reliable water supply than regions west of the [Great Dividing] Range and it is accessible to the city, producing food that is local and seasonal”.

Clover’s city government has moved on food. Last year, the City of Sydney started a grower’s market in the centre of the city adjacent to Hyde Park to bring some of this local food to city workers. The City is also expanding the number of community gardens and has employed a Community Gardening and Volunteer Coordinator. Clover Moore went on to criticise the loss or city fringe farmland to urban development, the developers’ lobby and its influence on state government.

Tying the intellectual threads of Hungry For Change together was Lyndey Milan, a food writer and broadcaster. Part of her role as MC was to introduce the SFFA’s President, Lynne Saville. Lynn was earlier involved in the creation of the Hawkesbury Food System and serves as a councillor on Willoughby Council.

Food journalist Joanna Savill, manager of the Sydney International Food Festival, addresses the Summit.

Lynn continued the themes introduced by Clover Moore, stressing the importance of the city fringe farmland to the security of the urban food supply and the industry it supports, and the need for a policy on food that underwrites sustainable production, food affordability and access by those who most need nourishing foods.

“By 2050, we will need to produce twice the amount of food we presently produce and on the same amount of land to feed an expected global population of nine billion”, she tells the audience. “Yet, 52 percent of Sydney’s vegetable farms are to be developed under the state government’s Metropolitan Strategy which will bring urban growth as large as the city of Canberra in the region.

“Climate change is a threat to our food supply and agriculture in Australia is respected to decline in productivity by up to 27 percent over the next 75 years. At the same time, greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture account for something like 24 percent of all emissions when non-farm sources coming from food processing and transport are included.

“The role of the SFFA is to put food security on the agenda. All Australian governments need a food policy and by 2030 we need to provide Sydney’s projected six million people with access to affordable, healthy food produced by a sustainable agriculture”.

Climate change and its likely impact on our food systems was a theme picked up on by Josh Wyndham-Kidd, the speaker from the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, who is soon to leave for the climate talks in Copenhagen. A little less nuanced in his criticism of government than other speakers, Josh said that the federal government’s policies “are lacking… they won’t reward farmers for carbon sequestration and, when it comes to climate change, agriculture and food, the government has no clothes.

“We are talking about the food my generation will live off”.

Josh Wyndham-Kidd, the speaker from the Australian Youth Climate Coalition.

Food waste a food issue

The NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Waters’ Bernard Carlon described how much of our food ends up in landfill.

Formally dressed in dark suit and tie, the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Waters’ (DECC&W)Bernard Carlon described how much of our food ends up in landfill.

“A total of 1,100,000 tonnes of food is lost to waste a year in NSW. Around 38 percent of household food, by weight, is wasted. That’s 800,000 tonnes a year, 315kg per household per year going into landfill. And that excludes food wastes that are composted.

“An additional 300,000 tonnes a year of food waste comes from the commercial food sector of which approximately 76 percent is lost during food processing. That excludes post-consumption waste from restaurants.

“In landfill, of course, food wastes are converted into methane, and methane is a greenhouse gas. It is estimated that food accounts for something like 23 percent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions”.

Bernard did not have encouraging news on household composting.

“Composting is decreasing in NSW. It has declined from 58 percent in 2000 to 38 percent in 2009. Now, there are more people who have never composted. This is attributable to urban consolidation and the lack of motivation to compost in multi-unit dwellings”.

Why waste?

Bernard outlined reasons why people waste food:

• lack of time to adopt other practices regarding food waste
• lack of time to organise and plan food purchases
• cooking too much food for a meal
• lack of knowledge of what to do with leftovers
• failure to check food stocks before purchasing
• being tempted by food retailers’ specials.

The Department has taken the initiative to allocate a total of $7.7 million in funding to regional food projects such as those of Wollongong Council and the Northern Rivers councils of North Coast NSW. Propelling food wastes as an issue for our food system will be a DECC&W website devoted to the topic that will come online in the new year.

The farmers perspective

Ed Biel is a Sydney region, urban fringe commercial farmer whose address focused on a number of themes coming from a farming perspective.

Sydney urban fringe foodland farmer, Ed Biel.

“In a city of 4.5 million there is competition for water, and water is needed for farming too.  The reliability of the water supply in the Sydney Basin is greater than it is in the Murray-Darling Basin”.

The anticipated greater reliability of water in the Sydney Basin during a period of climate change, compared to regions west of the Great divide, was a topic that other speakers raised in advocating saner farmland policies for the Sydney region foodlands.

Ed listed trends affecting the viability of farming on the city fringe:

• the rural conflict that comes with urban expansion into farming areas where new residents clash with the established farming industry over noise and odour; Ed said that there is a need to protect farmers
• farmers receive too little return for their product; this is in part due to the way the supermarket duopoly works, to the importation of subsidised farm product from overseas and the low labour cost in some countries; Ed said that like the supermarkets, farmers have a right to a reasonable margin on their product
• land, said Ed, is becoming scarce and rezoning land for agricultural use won’t automatically lead to its use for that purpose — that needs economic viability and the support that comes through the market
• fragmentation among farmers, especially along the lines of farmer ethnicity, is another limiting factor and response to farming issues due to this is lacking.

Finally, Ed raises the issue of how city eaters are to identify Sydney Basin produce — there is no branding such as an identifying label or logo for the city fringe farm product. Developing one would increase the value of the local product, says Ed, and attract a premium on local produce. A ‘brand local’ would bring market power, he tells the audience, and it should be recognised by the supermarkets.

Ethnicity and city fringe farming

In a breakout session at the Hungry For Change Food Summit, the University of Western Sydney’s Dr Francis Parker, a researcher and an authority on Sydney’s urban fringe foodlands, returned to the ethnicity of the region’s farmers previously mentioned by Ed Beale.

Francis explained that:

• 90 percent of the region’s small, family-based farmers have a non-English speaking background
• 90 percent cannot read English
• they produce 90 percent of Sydney’s perishable foods
• they are entrepreneurial
• they include many young farmers (in contrast to the aging of the Australian farming demographic)
• the number of market gardens supplying the city is in decline, having shrunk from around 2000 only a short time ago to around a little over 1000 today.

The popular idea that immigrant farmers come from peasant backgrounds is a misconception. Many do not have a rural background and some are professionals, says Francis, but they lack a capacity with English. Commonly, they start by leasing farmland, working long hours and eventually buy the land, mainly by borrowing from friends rather than the banks. Francis says it is true that there is fragmentation in the ethnic farming demographic.

Suburban fringe dwellers as CAVE people

Planner and urban fringe farming advocate, Ian Sinclair.

Ian Sinclair is a planner and planning educator specialising in the rural-urban fringe. A neat man in suit and tie, his presentation was so packed with information that it must have been quite a challenge getting through it in the time he was allocated.

Ian started off reiterating the food security and economic value of Sydney’s urban fringe farmers.

“The fringe is a significant food production area”, he tells the audience. The value of Sydney’s foodlands, Ian says, is easily recognised through its combination of:

• supplying 91 percent of Asian vegetables to the greater Sydney region
• 12 percent of the state’s farm production takes place on this tiny portion of its agricultural land
• 5 percent of the nurseries in Australia are found in the region
• the presence of a substantial turf and cut flower industry.

All of this is worth around $1 billion a year. As for climate change altering the rainfall pattern: “We have water in the Sydney Basin”, says Ian, emphasising the likelihood that the region will retain significant rain as other parts of the state become drier. This possibility alone makes retention of the Sydney Basin farming industry more than just a good idea.

Recreational lawnmowing on new urban lands

“Rural residential development displaces agriculture”, says Ian in reference to housing lots of 2ha or more on the urban fringe where the land is not used for food production or other agricultural development. Around 78 percent of western Sydney landuse is now rural residential and, as well as creating more urban sprawl, rural residential impacts the environment.

…What’s needed… is a rural landuse study to identify prime and marginal agricultural lands and to zone landuse accordingly…

“Recreational lawn mowing”, says Ian, is one of the fringe suburbanites favourite activities, yet it produces no useful product from the rich farmland those people occupy. Urban development of once-were-farms on the urban fringe also brings suburbanites into conflict with the remaining farms. Seeking a ‘rural’ lifestyle, these new fringedwellers move to the urban fringe foodlands then complain about farming activities and the noise, night activity and odour that is part of farming. This gives rise to what Ian calls complainant CAVE people: Citizens Against Virtually Everything.

What’s needed, according to Ian, is a rural landuse study to identify prime and marginal agricultural lands and to zone landuse accordingly. Ian’s long experience as a planner in urban fringe development, including periods with local government, gives substantial credibility to his proposal that a ‘cluster subdivision’ model be adopted, where subdivisions are surrounded by agricultural landuse.

This sounds very much like the idea proposed by the UNSW’s Dr Ted Trainer in the 1990s. When Ted proposed it, the inspiration was less conserving urban fringe farmland as an agriculturally productive landscape and more the search for an ecologically viable way to live. Ted is an educator-come-social-philosopher-come-visionary, however his writings have lacked the ‘how-to’ element that Ian Sinclair has  clear ideas on.

Ian also spoke of land being held by land trusts to prevent subdivision, and that developers be required to set aside land in new developments for community food gardens. In New York, some of the urban land occupied by the city’s community food gardens is held in land trusts and the model has proven viable as a means of retaining land for specific uses.

Advocates of sustainable urban fringe farming and sustainable urban development need to “find an angle and press it”, he said.

Plan > do > check > act for food democracy

Flinders University School of Medicine's John Coveney raised the idea of food democracy and said that healthy food is unaffordable to many.

John Coveney has a public health and nutrition background and came to Hungry For Change from South Australia’s Flinders University School of Medicine. An innovative thinker, he raised the idea of “food democracy”, a term that reframes the commonly-used ‘food security’ as the right to safe, nutritious food while producing a fair economic return to growers.

Healthy food, John said, is unaffordable to many. Whereas most people commonly spend around 12 percent of their income on food, those less affluent spend around 30 percent.

Food advocates should “celebrate and record small successes”, says John. He recommends the Action Learning methodology as a basis for food advocacy. This is envisioned as a loop of action consisting of: plan > do > check > act.

Partnerships ok on Coffs coast

Although Jeanette Longfield said she has a hesitancy about forming partnerships, the experience of Nick Rose in creating the Coffs Coast Local Food Futures Alliance, an equivalent organisation to SFFA, has turned out differently. Established in 2008, the Alliance is made up of Coffs Harbour Council, North Coast Area Health Service, Landcare, CROPO (an organic producers’ agency), the Bellingen Local Food Network and local citizens. This, according to Nick, forms a foundation for joint work to address food rights and access, sustainable farming practices and the development of a local food economy.

An outcome of one of the DECC-funded regional food projects, the Alliance’s objectives include:

• development of a local food strategy
• a program of community education and awareness creation
• the establishment of two model community gardens (the Bellingen Community Garden Association is assisting this objective and the author, representing the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network, is to address Coffs Harbour council and citizens in early 2010).

The region is likely to have its own community supported agriculture initiative in the new year, following the visit by Food Connect Brisbane’s Robert Pekin earlier in the year. An ‘Eden at Home’ home food growing course in association with TAFE and the local community college and the establishment of a farm gate trail are on the agenda. The educational value of the ‘permablitz’ model of mutual assistance of home food garden development is also of interest to the Alliance.

…people have formed local food and seed saving groups, a food swap has started to operate as a means of exchanging surplus production and avoiding food waste…

Good ideas are not the property of the Coffs coast folk alone. They are also gestating in the Blue Mountains, less than 100km west of Sydney.

There, says local food initiative advocate John McNiell, people have formed local food and seed saving groups (through which vegetable, herb and other seeds are collected, processed and exchanged), a food swap has started to operate as a means of exchanging surplus production and avoiding food waste and there is an existing community garden and another in formation.

“Self-sufficiency is a myth”, John tells the breakout group, proposing instead what amounts to a community-based self-reliance.

“The question is this: What do you do with garden surplus? Where do you buy local food?.

“The Blue Mountains has two local markets at which you can swap, sell or give away your excess produce. Some locals sell home-grown lettuce, parsley and other produce to local cafes and the Blue Mountains Food Co-op accepts local produce. What we need is the ‘law of large numbers’… lots of gardens producing a surplus and and connecting people locally. This would be the start of a local food economy”.

And John has an idea for doing this through an Internet-based food swap based on a simple postcode search to locate local opportunities for exchanging food. Liz Bastian, a well known Blue Mountains permaculture designer and community activist, supported John by saying that seed, vegetable and food swaps occur monthly.

Reframing the advocates message

Speaking of food advocacy, Jeanette Longfield suggests that advocates avoid adopting the terminology of those that oppose them because this merely validates the core of their opponents’ argument. Instead, she suggests reframing the issue in terms that enhance the argument of food advocates.

“How you put an idea is really important”, she says. Food advocates should think about how people are likely to interpret the ideas they put forward and select appropriate language. She offers examples from the work of Sustain:

• the statement that the present food system implies that ‘people are likely to suffer’ may be interpreted by those not suffering from lack of food as ‘not me’, believing that they have escaped this fate
• the term ‘heathy diet’ is interpreted as ‘lettuce and lentils’ and understood as unappealing
• reference to some ‘future disaster’ raises the idea ‘it’s ok now, at present’ and is unlikely to stimulate action.

Jeanette suggests finding more acceptable, more appealing terms such as replacing ‘healthy’ with ’tasty’ or ‘good’ when it comes to describing the type of foods advocates are proposing.

“Use powerful imagery” in advocating a sustainable and fair food system, Jeanette advises.

The start, not the end

Day two of the SFFA’s Hungry For Change Food Summit saw participants go in different directions. While some stayed at the conference venue to craft the Declaration on Food, others went on bus tours to the Sydney foodlands of the north west and the south west where they visited urban fringe farmers. Another tour voyaged through the inner city and out to the ends of the Eastern Suburbs to visit urban food initiatives, including community gardens, the Phillip Bay market garden in Randwick and an apartment block in Maroubra that has turned its front lawn into a vegetable garden.

Hungry For Change was the culmination of months of planning and the hard work of SFFA members, especially Liz Millen and Catriona McMillan. More than this, it was the culmination of the drive for a secure and tasty food future by the nearly seven hundred who attended the regional food lead-up events and those at the Hungry For Change Food Summit.

In handing the Declaration on Food to the politicians at Parliament House, Catriona handed on those hopes and desires, those ideas and demands articulated by all who attended the Hungry For Change events, as well as the others who could not attend the lead up and Summit event but who support its ideas, demands and initiatives.

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Pat Rayner

I HAVE  JUST SPENT A SUNNY Sydney Sunday with 850 others at the Opera House listening to Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food.

His inspiring message — at an international level — was that of Sydney Food Fairness Alliance at the metropolitan level and the Blue Mountains Sustainable Food Group, or your local permaculture group, at the community level.

Carlo’s issues

Carlo raised issues of:

• loss of biodiversity
• loss of species
• losing farmers’ knowledge
• water and its high usage in monoculture agriculture
• health
• malnutrition in affluent countries
• food miles
• and the waste of food while people are malnourished.

Carlo Petrini’s examples were international but they easily could have been our metropolitan or regional examples.

He cited the example of farmers in Piedmont, Italy, who now grow turnips for export because the capsicums they traditionally grew are now imported from the Netherlands as they are cheaper and fit into the supermarket boxes.

Valuing the local producer

The film on Terra Madre showed fishermen from Senegal, farmers from Nigeria, a raisin grower from Afghanistan, a bread maker from Lebanon, a high school student from USA and a haddock fisherman from Scotland. They all had the same concern — the need to value food, to value the small, local producer and protect these producers and the diversity of their produce.

In the 1950’s in Italy, 15 percent of the population were farmers. In the USA it was 40 percent. Now, less than 4 percent are farmers in Italy and in the US only 1 percent.

Carlo said we need an alliance of farmers and consumers… we need to learn where food comes from… we must give value back to food.

He said that affluent countries spend 12 percent of their income on food where we used to spend 30 percent, but we also spend 12 percent of our income on mobile phones. He suggested we make fewer calls and pay more for locally produced food.

We need to give value back to food. He suggested a holistic approach to food culture —  local production and eating locally produced food which, in turn, develops the local economy and biodiversity in production.

Small farmers have a right to exist. He cited the example of Milan where farmers on periurban lands face the dilemma of low food prices but large sums from developers.

So, he said, we need to pay more for local food and politicians need to be more far sighted. He also gave an example of a high school in the US which wanted a school garden but had no space. Five spaces from the car park were given over to the school garden. Does this all sound very familiar?

It made me realise that we are all concerned about the same issues, face the same problems and are finding our own solutions, whether at the international level of Slow Food, the metropolitan level of Sydney Food Fairness Alliance or the local level of Blue Mountains Sustainable Food Group.

We need to see the interconnectedness of these movements, acknowledge the work of the others… and we need to forge links between these.

Pat Rayner works with Sydney Food Fairness Alliance and is active in permaculture initiatives in the Blue Mountains of NSW.

SATURDAY was an uncharacteristically mild winter’s day in Sydney as we turned into the carpark of the Carrs Park Community Centre, once a bowling club. Demographic change had led to the abandonment of the club and, just across from the carpark, a visible sign of the repurposing of what, for a generation, had been the site of the not too energetic recreation of lawn bowls was rising within the confines of a safety barrier.

The first bale is placed at Carrs Park Community Garden's outdoor classroom. (From left): Jenny Howie (Kogarah Council), Susan (Huff'N'Puff), Fiona Stock (Kogarah council).

It had been months since Faith Thomas and I had been here. Then, the deserted bowling green had been a flat plain of low, patchy grass. Now, an enthusiastic bunch of people were erecting a strawbale classroom to go with the Carrs Park Community Garden that is starting to grow like some fungus emerging from the damp earth.

Faith and my mission on that project for Kogarah Municipal Council had been the multipronged one of writing council policy directions on community gardening, writing a gardener’s manual to cover the management of the garden, conducting a community consultation throughout the municipality to bring together a core group of people interested in starting the community garden, and conducting two participatory site design days. These had developed concept plans for the garden. It was those plans that Council’s landscape architect, Anthony Parker, had mashed together into a site design.

Kogarah Council's waste manager, Fiona Stock, has seen the project through from the start.

A site changed forever

As we walked over to the garden to meet Council’s waste manager, Fiona Stock, the woman who has driven the community garden project and made it happen, noticeable were the works that have made the old bowling club building, now the community centre, more accessible. Inside the room used by the community garden crew I could see the Huff’N'Puff strawbale building people taking the gardeners and others through the four day course in strawbale construction.

Outside, on what had been that flat plain of low grass, the base of the outdoor classroom had been completed only the day before. Construction-wise, it consists of a base of old vehicle tyres infilled with soil and capped with a cement deck. A timber framework has started to rise from it and this is now being infilled with strawbales held firmly between steel rods. That previous day had seen the strawbale crew experimenting with different types of render to apply to the strawbales, one of which has been selected and which will be coloured to match the community centre building.

It would have been easy to have the construction crew from Living Spaces do all of the work themselves, but Fiona and her co-worker, Jenny Howie, have made the right decision that this should be a participatory construction under the supervision of the Huff’N'Puff crew.

Roofing tile seconds have been used as durable garden edging and the garden mulched.

A garden emerges

And what of those concept plans developed on the final day of the participatory design process?

The first manifestation of them are the two parallel, curving garden beds that already support the growth of edible winter greens. Here, the gardeners have taken an idea from the Randwick Community Organic Garden which used roofing tile seconds placed upright into the soil to make a low maintenance but very durable garden edging. Paths of bark chip have been laid around the beds. A compost-rich soil topped with a mulch layer of light yellow straw reveals that these are new gardens. So too does the line of young citrus along the eastern perimeter of the one-time bowling green.

More is to come. After the garden is officially opened, the area in the middle of the green will be progressively built over with community garden allotments, the two existing beds being for shared gardening. Over in the corner, a small area has been reserved for children from Council’s childcare centre that occupies the basement of the community centre building. Provision for disabled gardeners and visitors is to be installed as well.

A mother and daughter team apply silicon sealant in peparation for placing the straw bales.

A surprising find

I watched that warm Saturday afternoon as the gardeners, and those who had come especially for the strawbale building course, hefted bales and did all those things that go into making a strawbale building. Pleasing to see were faces familiar from our community consultation and participatory site design days.

It’s long been my philosophy that things usually take longer than planned to get done. But this garden and the associated outdoor classroom are an exception. Thanks for that go, first of all, to the community garden crew, then to the Huff’N'Puff folk who advise and help people unfamiliar with building to erect something of lasting community value. Thanks also go to Anthony Parker, Council’s landscape architect, to Fiona Stock and to Jenny Howie, all of whom participated in the site design activity and all of whom have maintained their enthusiasm through the trials and tribulations that are a part of any innovative project.

It was surprising to find that so much work had been done. The Carrs Park Community Garden, with its multiple user groups and outdoor classroom, truly shows the value of collaboration in going out and making things.

Huff'N'Puff's Susan makes a measurement to size a strawbale to fit.

More photos: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?saved&&suggest&note_id=148969942904&id=46128279174#/album.php?aid=135672&id=46128279174&ref=mf

The Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network annual conference 2007.

An unofficial report by Russ Grayson

MARCH IN MELBOURNE is a meteorologically confused time. One day, it’s hot and sticky – T-shirt weather. The next, it’s cold and windy – jackets are the order of the day. Then the rain comes, not in any great downpour but in sporadic showers, for this is a city in drought.

There’s some indefinable quality about this southern metropolis that makes it a more… how do I put it?… a more humane city than its bigger, brasher cousin to the north. It’s easier to move around, something enhanced by its frequent tram services and the long main roads that take you on long, long journeys through the suburbs.Unlike Sydney, Melbourne is not a city fractured by harbours, ridges and valleys.

This is the city that, late in March this year, hosted the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network (ACFCGN) national conference, the fourth such event. The others – the first in Bendigo’s wet cold, then in the sticky heat of the Sunshine Coast and, last year, in Adelaide’s dry heat – were more internally focused. The Melbourne ACFCGN crew – in the guise of Cultivating Community and other supporters – thought that something more ambitious was in order. And they delivered.

Ben Neal has done much to improve community food gardening on social housing estates in Melbourne. Ben was CEO of Cultivating Community.

Ambitious, successful, well attended and inspring

People came from all states – and, yes, that includes those well away from the eastern seaboard – Western Australia, Tasmania, South Australia and the Northern Territory. There were two from Christchurch, though I do not list them as coming from other states because New Zealanders get a bit touchy about that. Those two came from the Christchurch Community Gardens Association in that pleasant, flat, windy and otherwise freezing city.

Victoria’s Minister for Housing, Richard Wynne, opened the conference which was held in the somewhat ornate but faded Victorian (the period of history, not the state) opulence of Collingwood Town Hall. There, a changing audience numbering in the hundreds gathered to listed to speakers such as David Holmgren, co-founder of the Permaculture design system; international relocalisation and local food advocate, Helena Norberg-Hodge; gardener and author, Jackie French; ABC television’s gardener, Jerry Coleby-Williams; Indian campaigner and author, Vandana Shiva; the UK Federation of City Farm’s Mike Marston and others.

Given that the themes of the different days — school gardens and education, community gardening, seed saving (it was the Seed Savers’ Network’s annual conference) and food security— attracted the same core of attendees but a differing peripheral audience, the number in attendance may have been higher in total than that of the best-attended day.

Ian’s new book

Permaculture educator, Ian Lillington, launched his new book – TheHolistic Life – Sustainability Through Permaculture – at the conference.

The volume is a welcome addition to the design system’s library of titles. Ian speaks of how and why he became involved in the design system and how he used its principles to design and build his earth construction house at Willunga, South Australia.

Ian and family now live in Victoria where he is involved in training in the accredited Permaculture training courses.

Speakers inform, influence and inspire

David Holmgren spoke of a ” …design system coming from permaculture to look at food security in this world of less energy”. Permaculture remains relevant, he said, because “it is about people and food, about connection with nature, tools and community”.

David’s mention of ‘tools’ struck me as interesting. It reminded me of Stewart Brand and Harold Rheingold’s Whole Earth Catalog of the 1970s which focused on access to tools for self-reliant living for the ‘back to the land’ or ‘alternatives’ movement which later influenced permaculture. Just as successive editions of the Catalog made tools accessible and developed a network around itself, so too, I thought, does the sustainability movement and permaculture (which can be the same thing) bring new tools for thinking, sharing information and acting on the world.

David sees permaculture having entered a “new wave” in the new century and spoke of how localisation is the way forward, bringing with it the development of local food economies. As with global warming, ideas spread, he said, and ” …can change things quickly”. If the awakening of the last five or six years continues, David suggested, it could lead to policy change.

This, too, is an interesting point worthy of a little thought. I don’t know if anyone has documented the change in public attitude over that short period, but it seems that climate change, the potential peaking of the oil supply and other topics have come to some kind of maturity as political issues in the past five to six years. Sure, they were there in the 1990s but not with the political presence they now command. For sustainability advocates – and that includes permaculture people – the question is about how we respond to that change and seek to influence public perceptions and political policies.

David went on to say that, “The global to local message is profoundly empowering”, and that it links the local food movement to sustainability and the “economics of happiness”.

Localisation the opportunity, says Helena

The economics of happiness was also a theme of another keynote speaker who has long been an advocate of local food systems in the UK and Australia, Helena-Norberg Hodge (author, Ancient Futures; co-author Bringing the Food Economy Home).

Helena Norberg-Hodge from the International Society for Ecology and Culture spoke at the community gardens' network conference. Helena is a local food advocate who has promoted community supported agriculture in the UK and the development of local food systems in Australia..

After three decades of educating, campaigning, writing and developing new components of localisation (Helena was influential in the establishment of Byron Bay’s weekly farmers’ market) she come to the conclusion that “the emerging localisation movement” can influence public opinion and shape government policy.

“The economics of happiness, with the cultivation of community cultures of place, are essential to combating terrorism. The consumer monoculture destroys biodiversity and people’s self-respect”, she told an enthralled audience.

Global communications enables carbon-free speakers

In keeping with the carbon-neutral objectives of the conference, Vendana Shiva spoke from Delhi by audio link and the UK Federation of City Farms Mike Marsden appeared “from the snowy northern UK” on a large screen via video phone, his talk illustrated by a synchronised Powerpoint presentation projected on an adjacent screen.

If the world chooses a reduced-carbon pathway with less international travel, and if we are to retain effective global communications, then such technologies will have to become better developed and commonplace as well as cheap, very reliable and ported to handheld devices such as mobile phones. Their use at the conference may thus turn out to be a harbinger of the future and the conference organisers are to be congratulated in deploying these new technologies rather than flying overseas speakers to Melbourne.

Workshops – too many to attend

There were workshops aplenty.

Su Dennet from Melliodora, not far from Melbourne at Hepburn Springs, gave a succinct run down on the many different ways of improving food security at home through preserving, bottling, drying and so on.

Understandably for a conference in which food was a theme, the workshop was packed.

The Illawarra and Sydney food fairness alliances teamed up with Wollongong City Council’s sustainability educator, Vanessa John, to explain their missions and activities. Council employs staff to focus on food security in the region.

The enviable record of Cultivating Community

Cultivating Community CEO, Ben Neil, described how the work of the association has grown to include 20 community gardens, two food cooperatives in low income areas and the school-based garden-to-kitchen program.

Cultivating Community, the Victorian end of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network, employs a number of people to work in assisting public housing residents develop community gardens for local food production on their estates. They also assist non-estate community gardeners and were involved in the Collingwood College school-garden-to-kitchen program with local chef and author, Stephanie Alexander.

Cultivating Community is now developing its own school-garden-to-kitchen program in which students grow, harvest, prepare, cook and eat the food they grow at school.

Tours to inspire

Tours offered the choice of visiting either school or community gardens.

Evident was the high productivity and good order of the public housing estate community gardens supported by Cultivating Community, gardens which are farmed mainly by immigrant peoples.

Oh, yes – the food, the places, the people

Let me tell you how good and inspiring the annual CERES Harvest Festival was on Sunday, the last event of the week. There, I met the CERES Food Project crew and was rewarded with home made baklava and dalmados just for taking their photo for Community Harvest – the journal of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network.

I sampled a home made red brewed by an Italian gardener from CERES allotment garden and enjoyed a rather filling Harvest Festival feast featuring foods representative of the ethnically-diverse people who come into CERES. Conspicuous were the Seed Savers’ Network’s Jude and Michel Fanton, buzzing around pointing their video camera at anything interesting as they set out on their new careers as video producers.

And let’s not forget the sumptuous morning and afternoon teas and lunches prepared by different caterers each day, and the conference dinner at Lentil as Anything, adjacent to Collingwood Children’s Farm. Lots of varied food and no fixed prices — you pay what you think the food is worth. Yes, it’s a café run on trust.
There was also the conviviality of impromptu meals at places such as the Vege Bar in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, with the crew from the Illawarra — including Dan Deighton and his wild bunch of school and community garden designer-builders.

Melbourne Slow Food people were there too, and they came on the bus tour of community food gardens. After the tours, we finished the conference on Saturday night with a party at Veg Out Community Garden in St Kilda, an exuberant place that combines food production (including cooking in the big wood-fired oven they built), the works of gardener-artists dotted through the allotments and the conviviality of good company. Unfortunately, they had none left of the crisp vintage they bottle under the Veg Out label, made partly from grapes grown in the garden and with the support of a friendly Yarra Valley vigneron.