Updated Peoples’ Food Plan

Authors: the People

Editors: Tammi Jonas, Jessica Power, Zoe de Castro, Penny Kothe, and Ben Trethewey


Acknowledgement of Country

The updated Peoples’ Food Plan draft was written and edited by contributors across multiple nations and sovereignties. We acknowledge the Traditional Owners on the respective lands and waters on which we reside, and honour their care and custodianship of Country for millennia. We acknowledge that we are farming on unceded lands with which the Traditional Owners have a deep spiritual connection. 

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that the following document may contain images of or references to the deceased.

Executive Summary

The original Peoples’ Food Plan published in 2013 was the founding document of the then-newly formed Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA). Its collaborative development with over 600 people across the country was the beginning of a process of collectivisation of a broad spectrum of organisations and individuals working towards a just and sustainable food system that is today a thriving and powerful food sovereignty movement in Australia.

Food sovereignty asserts everyone’s right to nutritious and culturally-appropriate food produced and distributed in ethical and ecologically-sound ways, and our right to democratically participate in food and agriculture systems.

The updated Peoples’ Food Plan is a democratically drafted document reflecting more than a decade of collective efforts by a diverse demographic of First Peoples and settler Australians. While its starting point is the original Peoples’ Food Plan, it draws heavily on a decade of more than 50 government submissions based on input from our members and case work done by the AFSA Legal Defence Fund (LDF), which works to support farmers as they navigate legal and policy frameworks that often don’t suit their scale or modes of production, processing and distribution. The Plan also benefits from contributions from several AFSA members whose academic research focuses on food sovereignty, agroecology, right to food, public health, and political ecology, grounded in action research and grassroots experiences. The updated Peoples’ Food Plan is also informed by a decade of international work and solidarity with our comrades of La Vía Campesina the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), Urgenci: the international network for community-supported agriculture, and the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM). Nearly a year of collective drafting and targeted consultation sessions with members and allied organisations has brought us to the current draft by the people, for the people.

The Peoples’ Food Plan is underpinned by the seven pillars that food sovereignty asserts: food is for people, builds knowledge and skills, works with nature, values food providers, localises food systems, puts control locally, and food is sacred. Framed by the pillars and the needs of the human and more-than-human world, the Peoples’ Food Plan promotes actions from the individual and community levels to the collective and institutional, with peoples’ recommendations for educational institutions and local, state and federal levels of government. The Plan warns of false solutions promoted by corporations and elites, and offers horizontal knowledge sharing in the form of case studies of actual, existing manifestations of food sovereignty in action in Australia and overseas.

The colonial capitalist economy continues to dominate Australian food and agricultural systems. Sustained neoliberal policy agendas, characterised by free-market deregulation, privatisation, and free trade, continue to privilege industrial agricultural productivism and exports, concentrating corporate power across the food system. This structural footing of Australia’s current agriculture and food system regime is the central issue addressed in the Peoples’ Food Plan. Colonial capitalism has devastated livelihoods, culture, biodiversity, soils, and the climate, and actively suppresses alternative visions for agriculture and food systems, especially those rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems. Under late-stage capitalism, the elite capitalist class has gained an astonishing level of control over food systems from production through to distribution, with strangleholds on everything from land ownership, dairy processing, and abattoirs to supermarkets. Control doesn’t stop with ownership, however, and is exerted so perniciously in our systems of governance that it severely limits democratic participation by First Peoples, smallholders and local communities in decision-making processes. From pharmaceutical and commodity RDC executives on the board of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicine Authority (APVMA) to the former Managing Director of Origin Energy chairing the board of the Climate Change Authority whilst also chairing the board of GreenCollar (Australia’s biggest carbon broker), regulatory capture in Australia is a clear and present danger to democracy.

In spite of these barriers to peoples’ involvement in growing, exchanging, cooking, and making decisions about the food we eat in Australia, there is a growing movement of farmers, First Peoples, allies and local communities fighting back with active optimism - an optimism born of being active in the changes we wish to see and be in the world. The food sovereignty movement is now over a decade old in Australia, and over 30 years old globally, and is working tirelessly to radically transform the food system from the ground up. Agroecology is central to the movement, a scientifically and experientially justified practice of agriculture that is sensitive to the ecosystems in which it is situated and that fosters the democratic participation of all peoples in the food system. Unlike the current oligarchical state of the food system in Australia, agroecology actively asserts everyone’s right to participate in decision making, ensuring those most affected by changes in policy and practice have the most say in those changes. The Peoples’ Food Plan advocates the principles and practices of agroecology as the solution to the devastating impacts of colonial capitalist food and agriculture systems. Those principles are described in the chapter on Agroecology, and they include: Recycling; Input reduction; Soil health; Animal health; Biodiversity; Synergy; Economic diversification; Co-creation of knowledge; Social values and diets; Fairness; and Connectivity.

First Peoples

We, the First Nations Sovereign peoples of Australia, acknowledge and affirm our inherent Rights, which include succession of Traditional Knowledge and Values. These Values and Intellectual Rights Per Se, to which our First Footprints, celebrate the First Hands to plant, and preserve the Covenant to the Creator Mighty God, as the witness to the First Sunrise. To the Elders, Educators and Successors of Truth, we now restore the Last to the First, and the First to the Last, in all we aspire, to collectively and concisely set Precedence, in literature and beliefs, to celebrate our Ancestors, their knowledge and obligation to fulfil Sovereign Rights in all our Societal Rights, to which include Food, and all of its properties.’ Cherissma Costelloe of the Gurang, Meeroni and Gooreng Gooreng Peoples

Respecting and promoting the sovereignty and rights of Indigenous Peoples is core to food sovereignty globally, and is reflected in AFSA’s ongoing work to decolonise our solidarity and support just relations between First Peoples and settlers in what is now called Australia. A First Peoples First[1] approach to food sovereignty reflects AFSA’s position that the food sovereignty movement in the settler colonial state of Australia must prioritise anti-colonial work towards reparations. Key issues identified in the Peoples’ Food Plan include:

The most obvious means to address the issues colonial capitalism causes for First Peoples is a full return of self-determination and Country. While the grassroots actions and peoples’ recommendations to institutions and governments offer diverse pathways forward, at their core is an insistence to respect First Peoples’ sovereignty that was never ceded, and to listen to First Peoples as they lead settlers to the ways to reparations they have long advocated. The updated Peoples’ Food Plan offers living examples of First Peoples’ initiatives working to benefit Traditional Custodians’ food sovereignty within traditional and colonial food systems, as well as examples of collaborations between smallholders and First Peoples to repatriate Aboriginal Land.

Right to Food

Food justice is a fundamental aspect of the Right to Food, and is reflected in the ‘food for people’ pillar of food sovereignty. It represents ‘a transformation of the current food system, including but not limited to eliminating disparities and inequities.’[2] It demands an acknowledgement of the racial, class, gender, ability and political inequalities historically designed into our food system.[3] For example, local food movements urging households to eat fresh food must account for low-income neighbourhoods who have been systematically deprived of access to healthy and sustainable food. Food justice is a key theoretical framework to understand the intersectional nature of inequity in the food system and to explore how communities can create environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives. Interrogating the root causes of food insecurity necessitates an examination not only of the structures of the food system, but of society itself. It demands we ask why society as a whole does not take responsibility to ensure that everyone can live a dignified life. Untangling the power relations that are stopping the vast majority of us who do believe everyone should be assured a dignified life, the Peoples’ Food Plan offers systemic and pragmatic ways to assure food security for all, starting with provision of a Universal (or Unconditional) Basic Income (UBI) for everyone.

The Plan provides definitions and explorations of some key areas of concern in the Right to Food, including distinctions between food security and food sovereignty approaches to ending hunger and obesity, a focus on first foods for babies, and the inalienable human right to water. Turning to priority populations, the Plan proposes grassroots and institutional solutions to the disenfranchisement of refugee and asylum seekers entering the Australian food system, and examines the failures of institutional food environments (schools, aged care, hospitals, prisons, and transport hubs) before offering peoples’ actions and recommendations to institutions and governments. A number of inspiring examples of community initiatives to care for each other and ensure the Right to Food is upheld as a shared social responsibility are included in the case studies.

Land and water use (Planning Law)

AFSA’s members recognise the impact of colonisation on First Peoples, and the colonial histories that dispossessed them, which continue to this day. We know that the role of farmers in the settler-colonial invasion has a direct and ongoing impact on that dispossession, as settler-colonialism is a ‘structure’ and ‘not an event’.[4] In our considerations of relations with the state around land and water use, settler farmers acknowledge we are also in relations with the Land and all on it, including the Traditional Custodians of the unceded Lands on which we farm. As we fight for autonomy and self-determination to enact agroecology on and with the lands we farm, so we commit to the struggle for First Peoples’ self-determination and right to Country.

Agroecology is a science, practice and movement that incorporates Indigenous knowledge systems with ecological principles to enable ecologically-sound and equitable food systems. This concept underpins the Peoples’ Food Plan recommendations for land and water policy in response to the consequences of the ongoing loss of small-scale farmers and need to support them for their critical work in combating climate change, protecting and promoting biodiversity and social justice, and respecting First Peoples’ sovereignty. Key issues identified in regards to planning provisions for land and water use include:

Although the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) assure the rights of First Peoples and smallholders to secure tenure and access to land managed by communities as commons, these rights are not upheld in the colonial state of Australia in 2023. Where the UN has long recognised the significant role played by First Peoples and peasants in maintaining biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, Australian land and water use policy does not reflect this, and in fact supports increasing consolidation of ownership and management by the most damaging industrial actors. At the same time that legislation allows the wealthiest industries to tighten control over agricultural land, it sells even more off to wealthy individuals as governments allow peri-urban encroachment of lifestyle blocks and outdated fortress conservation approaches to re-zoning farmland and excluding even agroecological stewards from healing Country while farming in harmony with Nature. Finally, the cognitive dissonance that leads governments to ‘protect’ land via the planning provisions from those it privileges in ownership leads to perverse outcomes for smallholders, who face significant barriers to farming and rural industry on smallholdings due to scale-inappropriate planning controls on everything from raising pastured pigs and poultry and growing lettuce for the local farmers’ market to building micro-abattoirs and opening farm gate shops.

The Peoples’ Food Plan advocates for devolving decision making to First Peoples, smallholders and  local communities to increase autonomy and self determination - rights assured in UNDRIP and UNDROP. It also advocates a scaled approach to planning controls that takes into account the low risk to environment, amenity and public health of human-scale systems exchanging or selling through direct supply chains to local communities. The case studies offer a range of community and policy approaches to protecting agricultural land, from the introduction of local taxes to enable shires to purchase and maintain valuable agricultural land and protect it from inappropriate development, to the establishment of agrarian trusts by communities committed to keeping land in commons. There is also an example of a community working positively with their local council to ensure the right to grow and exchange nutritious food is upheld by growing on neighbourhood verges (or nature strips), with consideration for pedestrian and vehicle safety through shared decision making. Looking overseas, the example of SAFER in France offers a more progressive and proactive level of government intervention that enables communities to make decisions on whether, how and who can buy and farm on agricultural land.

Water

For millennia, water has been held in the soil and landscape. This has been steadily decreasing over time due to the introduction of colonial agriculture systems, including sheep, cattle, monocultures of annual crops (many ill suited to a water scarce continent and most exported for profit for the few), and a disregard for First Peoples’ land management practices.

Water is precious like a sacred site; we need to be consulted and asked. Our ancestors have been here forever and still are. Working together, better communication.

Community members from Yeperenye in Northern Territory.[5]

Water must be viewed as a vital part of sustaining all life, from soils and crops, to animals and human beings. For over 65,000 years First Peoples have adopted this way of thinking and interacting with water as kin, not as a commodity. And yet in the relatively short time since Invasion, First Peoples have borne the brunt of the negative consequences of increasingly scarce and polluted water sources caused by colonial regimes.

While climate change threatens the availability and safety of inland water sources, colonial capitalist agriculture systems are still supported by government policy (and funding) to export more than 72 percent of what is produced here. Water is extracted by corporations at very low expense to be bottled in plastic and sold to distant communities for immense profits at the expense of the water security of local communities, in particular First Peoples, Country and farmers. It is not only inland waters abused by colonial systems - industrial aquaculture is killing marine and coastal ecosystems as governments prioritise growing the ‘blue economy’ over assuring Blue Justice.

In addition to assuring the rights of First Peoples, smallholders and local communities, the Peoples’ Food Plan fundamentally rejects the treatment of water as a commodity and asserts access to water as a human right, and water as having the right to exist and to flow as a right of Nature. The case studies profile local settler, migrant, and First Peoples communities collectivising to protect these rights from Martuwarra (Fitzroy River) in the west to Dhungala (Murray River) in the east.

Biodiversity is Biosecurity

Australian biosecurity strategies are limited to surveillance and control, completely ignoring prevention of the sources of biosecurity threats. Prevention does not begin at the border or the farm gate, it begins on the farm. Many emergent diseases such as novel porcine and avian influenza are born of intensive livestock production, a model that evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace asserts produces ‘food for flu’[6] – because ‘raising vast monocultures removes immunogenetic firebreaks that in more diverse populations cut off transmission booms’.[7]

Imperial expansion and colonial ‘development’ are the original invasive systems that have led to a catastrophic loss of biodiversity and First Peoples’ traditional biocultural knowledges and practices, and consequent increasing biosecurity threats. Any strategy that seeks to understand the growing threats to ecosystems, cultures, and economies must put First Peoples first to centre their right to self-determination and Country, and learn from traditional knowledges how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders propose to act.

So long as governments continue to scope biosecurity strategies with narrowly conceived categories of management of exotic and established exotic pests, weeds, and diseases, they fail to take a systems approach that acknowledges the complex interactions between species in ecosystems, and the history of colonial Invasion that brings us to the current vulnerable state of Australia’s food and agriculture systems. The Peoples’ Food Plan takes an evidence-based approach to analyse the well-understood role of industrial agriculture in loss of biodiversity and the consequent increase in biosecurity threats, with a particular focus on the most damaging impacts of intensive livestock production. It rejects the financialisation of nature and its role in furthering the same colonial capitalist systems that have caused the losses, and calls to shift One Health approaches upstream to the source of disease creation - sheds of immuno-compromised animals - making obvious the urgent need to reform production models away from monocultures to diversified agro-ecosystems. Finally, it includes recommendations for all Australians to consider the role of exotic domestic species and how we can reduce the devastating impacts on native species caused by household pets, horses, rabbits and more through responsible management at home and on farms. Case studies showcase organisations and farms doing exemplary work to conserve and sustainably use rare and heritage seeds and breeds of animals to restore agricultural biodiversity to ensure healthier ecosystems and food security for the future.

Value Chain

In terms of control of the food system, value chain infrastructure is held in even fewer hands than land in Australia. This consolidation has been happening steadily since the neoliberalisation of policy commenced in earnest in the 1980s, devolving protection of the public good to actors in free markets. The dairy industry is a salient example of what happens when the government abandons social democratic policy in favour of neoliberalism–in 1980 there were 21,994 dairy farms nationally, in 2022 just 4,420[8] remained, and by 2016 just five companies processed 79 percent of Australian milk by volume.[9] Abattoirs have gone through a very similar consolidation of ownership, leading to many smallholders losing access to slaughter options as large industrial abattoirs refuse to process private kills in favour of their own vertically-integrated operations.

Further downstream, the retail sale of food is even more heavily dominated by just two corporations - Coles and Woolworths - who own 64 percent of the grocery market. The scale, length and complexity of supply chains, and profit motives of these actors leads to pressure on farmers and shameful waste of more food than is needed to feed hungry Australians every day. In the native food industry, just 1 percent of native foods are sold by First Peoples, as the supply chain is almost wholly controlled by non-indigenous actors. The gig economy is another emerging value chain concern as a mostly unregulated, informal sector comprised often of migrant workers barely earning a livelihood in often unsafe working environments, while small businesses give up another proportion of meagre revenues to corporate profit.

While the government largely leaves regulation of markets to market players, it also invites the biggest players to its decision making tables, reducing opportunities for smallholders and local communities to influence reforms in the processing and distribution sectors of food systems. The Peoples’ Food Plan advocates for greater community control to rebuild local processing infrastructure and self-organised participation in the decision-making processes to get there, proposing that governments have primarily an enabling role in funding collaborative and cooperative projects that benefit local communities. Case studies show thriving examples of on-farm value chain infrastructure and cooperative efforts to feed the local community.

Food Safety

Australia has a very low incidence of food safety outbreaks, and AFSA seeks to maintain this food safety track record, while highlighting the disproportionate compliance burden placed on small-and medium-scale food businesses.

In most cases, small- and medium-scale food businesses are asked to meet the same standards as large-scale food businesses and importers. For example, in NSW, where a pasture-based egg producer is grading 100 eggs per day by hand for local consumption within days (not weeks like industrial eggs), they have to undergo an identical accreditation process to an industrial battery farm producing hundreds of thousands of eggs per day. This calls for a decreased regulatory burden and small-flock exemptions.

It is important to note that many small- and medium- scale food producers are also food businesses, who conduct processing and retailing of food, often selling direct to consumers. Therefore, the risk points that arise in the conventional industrial supply chain are vastly reduced, due to shorter supply chains resulting in less cold-chain risks and potential contamination points, as well as increased traceability.

Australia’s food safety regime has a narrow focus on things that might kill you quickly (e.g. pathogens), entirely ignoring the plethora of things that are killing people slowly, such as highly-hazardous pesticides and ultra-processed foods. While the Peoples’ Food Plan does not advocate a lax approach to food safety, it does firmly propose a systemic look at what makes food systems and the food they produce unsafe.

As with all aspects of the Peoples’ Food Plan, this section puts forward the need to not only consult with smallholders, First Peoples and local communities, but to collaborate and empower civil society to collectively determine our own food and agriculture systems in small-scale direct and transparent local food economies. The case studies showcase two of Australia’s best cheesemakers, who have pioneered a fledgling raw milk cheese industry, showing that the orthodoxy of sterility in food safety regimes is not the only safe path to food production, and is often a less delicious way that erodes smallholder and community autonomy in the food system.

Animal Welfare

To enhance animal welfare in farming systems, we must shift away from commodity-based, export-focused agriculture. Climate change and the recent COVID-19 pandemic have brought to the fore the key arguments AFSA has made historically against industrial livestock where large numbers of animals kept in confined spaces are a breeding ground for emerging zoonotic diseases. The increase in public concern over animal welfare has also called into question whether animal agriculture is able to adapt to and mitigate climate change and to address cruelty. AFSA’s role in this discourse has been to raise public awareness about alternatives to industrial farming such as agroecology and regenerative agriculture, to enhance animal welfare and restore degraded agricultural land. We advocate on behalf of pastured livestock farmers, where animals are managed in ways that respect their natural instincts, and that actively enhance pasture by allowing animals to graze and disturb an area, which is then left to recover before animals are reintroduced.

This approach comes full circle to underscore the value of all life on land and in water under agroecological farming systems. Every being within an ecosystem plays a critical role in healing Country and nourishing communities through the provision of food that is grown and produced in a way that is ethical, socially-just and ecologically-sound. Australian agriculture and water policy has a long way to go to enhance animal welfare on land, as well as marine and terrestrial waters. We believe the opportunity should be taken to explore ways to protect freedom of speech and animal welfare to reflect the change in social licence in this area, and note that this is an issue that is being debated across a number of Australian jurisdictions and internationally.

The Peoples’ Food Plan advocates for better government regulation of animal industries that requires adherence to the Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare, and that implements upstream elements of One Health approaches. Systemically, it advocates for an end to intensive livestock production - a source of animal misery and significant public health and environmental risks, including the rise of zoonotic disease and future pandemics. It also calls for inclusion of democratically-elected representatives of smallholders and civil society in decision making bodies around animal welfare. The case studies offer examples of highest welfare animal husbandry on small-scale agroecological farms.

Technology

Technology is seen as a solution to many things, not the least of which includes feeding the world, increasing food production, producing food in the cities, and solving the problems of industrial food production in the monoculture farming of animals and vegetables. However, there is already enough food produced to feed an estimated 11 billion people, and 70 percent of this is produced by smallholders with just 30 percent of agricultural land. By contrast, industrial agriculture produces just 30 percent of the world’s food with a staggering 70 percent of land.[10] Rather than promoting technocratic false solutions to problems in the food system, we should instead: reduce waste by producing food closer to where it is consumed; promote diversity in food production, processing and distribution; decentralise and move away from chemical-intensive farming; and address governance barriers to equitable distribution of food.

High tech (false) solutions that further entrench centralised production and distribution are often touted by Global North elites, including genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to reduce the need for pesticides in plants, lab meat as a solution to growing demands for meat, hydroponics and other intensification methods growing in response to the need to feed cities, and the digitalisation of agriculture.

The Peoples’ Food Plan advocates for adherence to the precautionary principle in the development or implementation of new technologies, and rejects putting profits before planet and people. It also advocates for technology justice, where control and decision making resides with First Peoples, smallholders and local communities, and privacy and autonomy are respected. It rejects GMOs and agricultural chemicals as undemocratic and toxic, and importantly, unnecessary, features of industrial agriculture. It also rejects ultra-processed foods and calls on governments to regulate their sale and promotion to protect public health, especially that of children. Case studies profile low-tech human-scale farming and the open source socially- and economically-just online platform Open Food Network that assists farmers with e-commerce and collaborative distribution, as well as farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing.

The Solution: Agroecology

The industrial system proposes to address the cascading crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, hunger and obesity, poverty, and biosecurity threats with more technology and the development of new so-called environmental markets (carbon and biodiversity being the primary markets, but with recent additions of reef credits and plastic credits[11] joining the list of false solutions). This increasing financialisation of nature is worse than band-aids on cancer, it is fighting cancer with cancer. The current economic system is fundamentally inequitable - capitalism is built on the exploitation of land and labour and the endless pursuit of profit (as opposed to livelihood). Agroecology, on the other hand, mends the ‘metabolic rift’[12] created by capitalism, by healing farmers’ and local communities’ relations with land and each other.

Overwhelming evidence shows ‘that a transition to an agriculture based on agroecological principles would not only provide rural families with significant social, economic, and environmental benefits, but would also feed the world, equitably and sustainably’.[13] The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has identified the ways that agroecology can bring solutions to several SDGs, including:

The evidence base is strong enough that agroecological principles are now also embedded in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted by nearly 200 countries at COP15 in December 2022.[15]                 

AFSA members practise agroecological and regenerative farming practices, with most increasingly aligning themselves with agroecology - a scientifically and experientially justified practice of agriculture that is sensitive to the ecosystems in which it is situated and that fosters the democratic participation of all peoples in the food system. Its original and still predominant practitioners are Indigenous Peoples and peasant smallholders the world over.

Degrowth and Connectivity: small-scale farming already feeds the world

Around 70 percent of food in the world is grown by small-scale food producers on small plots of land, with the remaining 30 percent grown by large-scale industrial farms,[16] which are responsible for 75 percent of ecological destruction from farming.[17] Beyond farming, 20 percent of the world’s population uses 80 percent of its resources.[18] Clearly the Minority World (aka the Global North) is using more than its share, and something has to change.

Agroecology promotes the ‘radical abundance’ which ensures sufficiency for all possible through degrowth, ‘demanding the “end of the scarcity capitalism produces through waste, hoarding, and privatisation”.[19] This form of abundance is ‘radically different from the bourgeois form of material wealth that is inevitably based on ever-increasing productivity and endless mass consumption of commodities’.[20] Central to degrowth is the principle of connectivity, which ensures proximity and trust between producers and eaters through fair and short (often direct) supply chains, and by re-embedding food systems in local economies.  

The Peoples’ Food Plan offers the peoples’ way towards a socially-just and ecologically-sound world that deals justly with future generations. Together, we’ve got this.

Table of contents

Acknowledgement of Country        2

Executive Summary        3

First Peoples        4

Right to Food        5

Land and water use (Planning Law)        5

Water        7

Biodiversity is Biosecurity        7

Value Chain        8

Food Safety        9

Animal Welfare        10

Technology        10

The Solution: Agroecology        11

Table of contents        13

About the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance        20

Who contributed to the Peoples’ Food Plan 2023?        21

List of Acronyms        22

Introduction        24

About the Peoples’ Food Plan        24

Theory of Change        26

Enacting our Theory of Change        27

Principles        29

First Peoples First        29

Women, youth and gender diverse peoples        29

Agroecology        29

Localisation and solidarity economies        30

The Seven Pillars of Food Sovereignty        30

Food for People (Right to Food)        31

Builds knowledge and skills (Horizontal knowledge sharing)        32

Works with Nature        32

Values food providers        33

Localise food systems        33

Puts control locally        33

Food is sacred        35

The Problems: Colonialism and Capitalism        36

Governance        37

Productivism and Exports        37

Free Trade Agreements        39

Colonial Capitalist Food System Case Studies        40

Climate change        42

Biodiversity loss        42

Waste        43

The Solution: Agroecology        45

Context        45

Governance and Participation        46

Degrowth and Connectivity: small-scale farming already feeds the world        48

A note on ‘agroecology’ and ‘regenerative agriculture’        48

What are the barriers to an agroecological transition?        50

False Solutions        50

Peoples’ Actions        52

What can I do?        52

What can my community do?        52

Collectivise, organise, act!        52

What can schools do?        53

What can universities do?        53

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations        53

Case Studies        56

Green Gate Organic Farm, NSW        56

Agroecology and food sovereignty curriculum - Victorian Government, Australia        56

Agroecology Dialogues (AFSA farmers)        56

Agroecology Beacon: Tumpinyeri Growers and Jonai Farms        57

CET Agroecology Lighthouse - Bio-Bio region, Chile        57

Melbourne Montessori - The Farm Experience        58

Reading the Peoples’ Food Plan        60

A note on communities vs. collectives        60

Using the Peoples’ Food Plan        60

What do we mean by ‘false solutions’?        61

First Peoples        62

Context        62

Issue: Loss of Country and Right to Land        63

Issue: Loss of Indigenous Food Sovereignty        63

Issue: Loss of Biodiversity        64

Issue: Loss of Rights to Traditional Knowledge and Genetic Resources        64

False Solutions        65

Peoples’ Actions        66

What can I do?        66

What can my community do?        67

Collectivise, organise act!        67

What can schools do?        67

What can universities do?        67

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations        69

Case Studies        72

Hope for Health        72

First Nations Bushfood and Botanical Alliance        72

Yaamarra & Yarral (Gamilaraay self-determination and food sovereignty)        73

Black Duck Foods (Yuin-owned native foods)        74

Nguuruu Farm (land repatriation)        74

Belvedere Farm (land repatriation)        75

Right to Food        76

Context        76

Food Security        76

Food Justice        77

Food Environments        77

Food Insecurity in Australia Today        78

Food Sovereignty Demands Structural Approaches to Food Security        80

Issue: First Foods        81

Issue: Right to water        81

Issue: Disenfranchisement of refugee and asylum seekers entering the food system        81

Issue: Institutional food services are failing Australia’s priority populations        82

Food in childcare and schools        83

Food in hospitals and aged care        84

Food in prisons        84

Food in relief centres        84

Food in public transport hubs        85

False Solutions        85

Peoples’ Actions        87

What can I do?        87

What can my community do?        88

Collectivise, organise, act!        88

What can schools do?        88

What can universities do?        89

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations        89

First Foods        90

Food environments        91

Food and water access        93

Case Studies        95

City of Onkaparinga, SA - Enabling resilient food systems in South Australia        95

Farm My School        96

Eagle Heights Edible Exchange        97

Cultivating Community, Melbourne        98

Food Next Door Coop        98

Community Grocer, Melbourne        100

Chile’s integrative food labelling and marketing policies        100

Land and water use (Planning Law)        102

Context        102

Issue: Farming on Aboriginal Country        103

Issue: Land access and secure tenure        104

Issue: Protecting agricultural land        105

Issue: Urban and peri-urban food production        105

Issue: Scale-appropriate planning controls        106

Pastured livestock        106

Horticulture        107

Rural Industry        108

Abattoirs        108

Farm Gate Shops        109

False Solutions        109

Peoples’ Actions        110

What can I do?        110

What can my community do?        110

Collectivise, organise, act!        111

What can schools do?        111

What can universities do?        111

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations        111

First Peoples        111

Land and water access, tenure, and custodianship        113

Protection of agricultural land        114

Rural Industry        115

Pastured livestock land use        119

Protection of biodiversity        119

Protection of water catchments        121

Case Studies        121

Food Resilient Neighbourhood Project (Brisbane)        121

Agrarian Trusts: An open opportunity for land justice in Australia        122

Open Spaces Sales Tax (Boulder, Colorado, USA)        122

SAFER – Agricultural Land Protection – France        123

Water        125

Context        125

A note on Aquaecology: A food sovereignty framework for socially-just, sustainable seas?        127

Issue: Right to water        128

Issue: Australia exports the majority of food produced for the profit of some at the expense of water for all        128

Issue: Climate change poses a threat to inland water        129

Issue: Water justice for First Peoples        129

Issue: Inappropriate extraction for bottled water        130

Issue: Industrial aquaculture is killing marine and coastal ecosystems        131

Issue: Blue Economy vs Blue Justice        132

False Solutions        132

Peoples’ Actions        133

What can I do?        133

What can my community do?        133

Collectivise, organise, act!        133

What can schools do?        134

What can universities do?        134

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations        134

Case Studies        136

Mildura Community Water Bank , Victoria, (Australia)        136

Water is Life: Traditional Owner Access to Water Roadmap, Victoria (Australia)        136

Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council        136

Indian villages defeating Coca-Cola        137

Biodiversity is Biosecurity        139

Context        139

Issue: Loss of biodiversity        139

Issue: Biosecurity threats are increasing        141

Issue: Intensive livestock increases the risk of zoonotic diseases        142

Issue: The need to shift One Health approaches upstream        142

Issue: Capitalising on biodiversity        143

Issue: Domestic invasive species        144

False Solutions        145

Peoples’ Actions        146

What can I do?        146

What can my community do?        147

Collectivise, organise, act!        147

What can schools do?        147

What can universities do?        147

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations        148

Case Studies        151

Rare Breeds Trust of Australia        151

The Diggers Club/Foundation        151

Tuerong Farm        152

Value Chain        153

Context        153

Issue: Corporate capture of native food value chain        154

Issue: Farmers are losing access to processing infrastructure        154

Issue: Australian food distribution is a duopoly        154

Issue: More food is wasted than is needed to feed hungry Australians        155

Issue: Corporate control extends to food and agricultural policy        156

Issue: Comfort, convenience and the gig economy        157

False Solutions        158

Peoples’ Actions        158

What can I do?        158

What can my community do?        159

Collectivise, organise, act!        159

Collectivise for direct distribution models        159

What can schools do?        160

What can universities do?        161

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations        161

Case Studies        164

Jonai Farms and Meatsmiths (Victoria, Australia) - CSA        164

Echo Valley (Goomburra, QLD) - CSA        164

Southern Harvest (NSW/ACT, Australia) - Farmers Market and Multi-farm box        165

Ocean Grove Farm (Collaroy, NSW)        166

Food Safety        167

Context        167

Issue: The rise of toxic and ultra-processed foods        167

Issue: Risk and scale-appropriate regulation        168

Issue: Duplication of effort across regulatory systems        168

Issue: Livestock, food safety, and public health        169

Issue: Lack of engagement with smallholders and civil society        169

False Solutions        169

Peoples’ Actions        170

What can I do?        170

What can my community do?        170

Collectivise, organise, act!        170

What can schools do?        171

What can universities do?        171

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations        171

Case Studies        173

Prom Country Cheese (VIC)        174

Bruny Island Cheese        175

Animal Welfare        177

Context        177

Issue: Industrial livestock production is animal abuse        177

False Solutions        179

Peoples’ Actions        180

What can I do?        180

What can my community do?        180

Collectivise, organise, act!        180

What can schools do?        180

What can universities do?        180

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations        181

Case Studies        183

Technology        185

Context        185

Issue: Techno-fixes violate the precautionary principle, putting profits before planet and people        185

Issue: Digital agriculture erodes the rights of smallholders        186

Issue: Technology justice        186

Issue: Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)        187

Issue: GMOs and AgChems - elixirs of death?        188

Issue: Ultra-processed foods (UPFs)        189

False Solutions        190

Peoples’ Actions        191

What can I do?        191

What can my community do?        191

Collectivise, organise, act!        191

What can schools do?        192

What can universities do?        192

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations        192

Case Studies        196

For Policymakers: Summary of Policy Recommendations        198

Methodology        199

Glossary        200

References        202

Executive Summary        202

About AFSA        202

Introduction        203

The Problems: Colonialism and Capitalism        206

The Solution: Agroecology        210

First Peoples        214

Right to Food        216

Land and water use (Planning Controls)        223

Water        225

Biodiversity is Biosecurity        228

Value Chain        231

Food Safety        233

Animal Welfare        234

Technology        235

Glossary        237

About the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is a farmer-led civil society organisation of people working towards socially-just and ecologically-sound food and agriculture systems. The democratic participation of First Peoples, small-scale food producers and local communities in decision-making processes is integral to these efforts.

Since the first publication of the Peoples’ Food Plan in 2013, AFSA’s founding document, farmers and allies across the country and around the world have continued to gather democratically to deepen and strengthen our positions on what constitutes the most socially-just and ecologically-sound food and agriculture systems.

 

AFSA provides a balanced voice to represent small-scale food producers and local communities’ interests at all levels of government. We connect small-scale food producers for farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing, assist local, state and federal governments in instituting scale-appropriate and consistent regulations and standards that enable agroecology and socially-just localised food systems, as well as advocate for equitable access for small-scale food producers to local value chain infrastructure and markets.

 

We are part of a robust global network of civil society organisations involved in food sovereignty and food security policy development and advocacy. We are members of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), La Vía Campesina (the global movement of small-scale food producers, and the largest social movement in the world), and Urgenci: the International Network for Community-Supported Agriculture. We also support the Australasian representative on the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM), which relates to the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS).

 

Our vision is to promote care for Country and all on it through agroecology and localised, socially-just food systems, while promoting First Peoples' rights to self-determination and Country. This has taken on an added salience in the face of the increasing impacts of the climate crisis, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and rising food prices resulting from flood, drought, fire, war, and inflation caused by corporate profiteering.[21] Australians care more than ever about the way their food is produced and how and where they can access it, with a growing awareness of its social, environmental, and economic impacts. Nutritious food produced locally in socially-just, ethical and ecologically-sound ways is increasingly in demand.

Governments must facilitate and encourage the emergence and viability of agroecology embedded in localised food systems with short and direct supply chains, thereby protecting the environment and human and animal health. Inextricable to this vision is the need to honestly and truthfully account for the land’s needs. As such, AFSA works to increase understanding of and appreciation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ connection to and care for Country and the ongoing impacts of colonisation and development on Country. We aim to put First Peoples’ knowledge first as best practice for healing Country and sustaining life, and as an organisation we are committed to decolonial futures for food and agriculture systems.

Who contributed to the Peoples’ Food Plan 2023?

The Peoples' Food Plan 2023 has been developed in conjunction with small-scale food producers and allies across every state and territory in Australia. For more information about the process, see the methodology chapter at the end of this Plan.

We would like to thank the following civil society organisations in particular for providing detailed input and feedback, including Victorian Farmers’ Market Association, Ediblescapes, Open Food Network, Gene Ethics, Seed Savers, Open Food Network, Right to Food Coalition, Friends of the Earth, Community Grocer, Food Next Door Co-op, Cardinia Food Circles, Sustainable Table and scholars from the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia, the University of Tasmania, the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, Southern Cross University, and Deakin University.

Thank you also to the following farms for providing feedback, and for your ongoing work to radically transform the food system from the ground up: Bellasato Farm (Qld), Echo Valley Farm (Qld), Belvedere Farm (Qld), Fork it Farm (TAS), Woodstock Flour (VIC), Southampton Homestead (WA), Jonai Farms (VIC), and Cherissma & Lincoln Costelloe, Port Augusta, Whyalla Communities (SA).

List of Acronyms

Acronym                     Words

 

ACC                                  Australian Competition and Consumer Commission

AFSA                            Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

ANBS                           Australian National Breastfeeding Strategy

AP                                Alternative Protein

ICESCR                        International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

CAFO                          Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation

CFS                              World Committee for Food Security

COP                             Conference of the Parties

CSA                              Community-supported agriculture (not to be confused with Climate Smart Agriculture)

CSIPM                         Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism

DAFF                           Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestries

DCCEEW        Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water

DFAT        Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

DPA                             Declaration of Priority Development Areas

ETC Group                  Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Consultation

FAO                             Food & Agriculture Organisation of the UN

FOE                              Friends of the Earth

FSANZ                         Food Standards Australia New Zealand

FTA                              Free Trade Agreements

GBAA                          Glasgow Breakthrough Agenda on Agriculture

GBF                             Global Biodiversity Framework

GHG                            Greenhouse Gas

GMO                           Genetically-Modified Organisms

HHP                             Highly Hazardous Pesticides

IPC                               International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty

IPCC                            Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

IPES                              International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems

LVC                              La Vía Campesina

MCWB                        Mildura Community Water Bank

NFF                              National Farmers Federation

PFP                               Peoples’ Food Plan

PHAA                          Public Health Association of Australia

RBTA                           Rare Breeds Trust Australia

SHA                             Southern Harvest Association

SI                                  Sustainable Intensification

UNDRIP                      UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

UNDROP                    UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants & Other People Working in Rural Areas

UNEP                           UN Environmental Program

UNFCCC                     UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

UPF                              Ultra-Processed Foods

VCE                              Victorian Certificate of Education

WTO                           World Trade Organisation


Introduction

About the Peoples’ Food Plan

In 2012, the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) developed its original Peoples’ Food Plan in response to the Australian Government’s National Food Plan. Unlike the Government’s National Food Plan, which was developed without participation from small-scale farmers and local communities, the Peoples’ Food Plan reflected the concerns and aspirations of eaters, farmers, community organisations, independent food businesses and advocacy groups. Developing the Peoples’ Food Plan was conducted as a model of participatory democracy in policy development – open, inclusive and democratic – because we knew the scale of the challenges and the urgency of the work needed to transform our dysfunctional food system, and that decision making is best located with those it affects.

When the Australian Government developed the (abandoned) National Food Plan over a decade ago, it enlisted three key actors in the process of identifying challenges and opportunities for agriculture, and strategic targets supported by government policies: The Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestries (DAFF), the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) and the Global Foundation.[22] In 2010, a National Food Policy Working Group was established to include agribusiness representatives from the National Farmers Federation (NFF) and Woolworths. Lack of broad representation from smallholders and civil society prompted strong criticism of the Working Group, in addition to lack of transparency in policy processes where meeting minutes were not made public.

Through the collectivising work around the original Peoples’ Food Plan, the food sovereignty movement in Australia emerged as an alliance of farmers, food systems organisations and individuals ready to take food justice into their own hands. 11 years on, AFSA has grown into a farmer-led civil society organisation championing the fight for food sovereignty.

Globally, food sovereignty was launched into public political discourse at the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996, with its political roots established in the fertile activism of La Vía Campesina (LVC) – the global movement of peasants.[23] In the words of McMichael, ‘food sovereignty emerged as the antithesis of the corporate food regime and its (unrealized) claims for “food security” via the free trade rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO).’[24] Where food security is concerned with ensuring Peoples' right and access to food, it fails to consider the social, political and ecological dimensions of corporate-driven food systems. Through the lens of food security, techno-optimism informs the increasing digitalisation of agriculture and rise of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), causing further social and ecological destruction and particularly impacting smallholders and Indigenous Peoples’ land across the world.

Going a step further, LVC recognised that while “food security” upheld food as a fundamental human right, it did not defend the objective conditions for producing food. Who produces? For Whom? How? Where? And Why? All these questions were absent, and the focus was on merely "feeding the people".[25] 

In contrast:

Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.[26]

Food sovereignty is upheld through 7 key pillars:

  1. Food for people
  2. Builds knowledge and skills
  3. Works with nature
  4. Values food providers
  5. Localises food systems
  6. Puts control locally
  7. Food is sacred

When AFSA launched the original Peoples’ Food Plan in 2013, it was a groundbreaking document that introduced food sovereignty into Australian discourses of policymaking, research, grassroots action, community groups and kitchen table conversations. A decade later, AFSA has engaged with local, state, and federal governments across all territories through stakeholder forums, submissions and advisory groups to advocate on behalf of our membership. We have formed strong alliances with other organisations working towards socially-just and ecologically-sound food and agricultural systems. We have also formed enduring relationships with many levels of government to win long-fought battles for legal reform that uphold the rights of smallholders across Australia. We have also lost battles to hold industrial agriculture accountable for social and ecological crises, where Australian agricultural policy continues to prioritise productivity and exports over localised systems.

It is these ongoing challenges, along with the escalating multiple crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, that have shaped the updated Peoples’ Food Plan. This Plan offers a peoples’ way forward, identifying actions that can be taken at every level from individuals in diverse social, cultural, ecological, and economic contexts, to community groups, democratically-organised collectives, and within educational and institutional settings. The Peoples’ Food Plan offers a policy framework for government at all levels to realise a food sovereign future for everyone.

The 2023 updated Peoples’ Food Plan is a culmination of AFSA’s grassroots and policy work since 2012, drawing on a decade of democratic gatherings of farmers and allies in addition to over 50 submissions to governments at all levels. In retracing our policy recommendations, AFSA identified the core themes to emerge from these submissions, highlighting the main barriers to food and agricultural transformation in Australia. We put forward fundamental principles that must be considered in all food and agricultural policy and legislation if governments aim to feed people, protect agricultural land and water, and respect and promote First Peoples’ sovereignty.

A simple set of framing questions has long been posed by La Vía Campesina to judge the health and fairness of food systems:

Answering these questions is usually sufficient to enable people to appreciate the manufactured complexity of industrial supply chains, an imperative in realising everyone’s right to nutritious and culturally-determined food grown and distributed in ethical, ecologically-sound, and socially-just ways. Our right to democratically determine our own food and agriculture systems.

Drawing on the definition of food sovereignty, we pose the following slightly longer list of questions to any proposed solutions to the problems facing our food and agriculture systems:

Theory of Change

To move towards food sovereignty, AFSA asserts that individuals, communities, collectives, organisations and governments must adopt a theory of change that roadmaps transformation to enable socially-just, ecologically-sound and culturally-determined food and agricultural systems.

AFSA Values and Theory of Change

We value our relationships with land, water, and sky, and acknowledge this is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land and waters, and that sovereignty was never ceded. We strive to care for Country and promote just relations between First Peoples and settler peoples.

In particular, we observe the input Mrs Jacqueline Blackman (Mer, Mabiuag and Yidinji Elder), for her affirming and acknowledging the Torres Strait and Yidinji Connections.  Nothing on Earth surpasses the Excelsiors, to the Most High, to acknowledge the  Creators gifts, in Land, Air, Waters and all Resources within, that are regulated by our Natural Sovereign  Laws.  These Laws within our Tribal Boundaries,  follow the patterns of the Climate, Stars and Seas, to cultivate and Survive, according to those Laws of Malo, Spiritual, Tangible and Dreaming’s,   We value biodiversity, and support agroecological food production that protects land, people, and the more-than-human world.

Change is important, as it indicates the patterns to which we have been blessed to learn new ways of living, surviving, and sharing our knowledge abroad.  It also gives a platform to youth, New Generations of Cultivators and Maintainers of our Values and Morale, to have recognised in Common and International Laws. Cherissma Costelloe of the Gurang, Meeroni and Gooreng Gooreng Peoples

We listen to First Peoples and promote their rights to voice, treaty, and truth. We are embracing custodial ethics, locating our practices in relationships of mutual obligation with both land and people, and expressing solidarities with the Original Custodians.

We support the movement away from the corporate-controlled, exploitative capitalist food system, which is shaped by unequal systems of power and oppression, and produces commodities for profit instead of food for people. Our solutions must dismantle systemic food injustices rooted in colonialism.

We value all parts of nature over profits. We acknowledge and respect everyone’s work in the food system, including unpaid, underpaid, and devalued labour. We work to honour culture and conviviality, and to protect and restore food literacy and traditional, non-industrial ways of growing, preparing, sharing, and eating food as a community.

We prioritise community, collaboration, mutual aid, horizontal knowledge exchanges, and equality, seeing them as necessary for and complimentary to individual autonomy. We reject any ideology that promotes individual rights over human rights.

We are concerned about the way the state tries to simplify things that are inherently complex such as agro-ecosystems, food economies, public health, water rights and food security through narrow policy and legislation, but we are not ‘anti-government’.

We seek to localise decision making, replacing the state where possible with smaller-scale, democratic collectives that organically emerge, such as citizens’ assemblies that allow direct democratic participation in decision making in local communities, and farmers’ and workers’ cooperatives to regain control of the means of production, distribution, and communication.

We are an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, pro-collectivist organisation working to build solidarity across movements working for food sovereignty, food security, climate action, workers’ rights, and against extractive industries. We embrace degrowth as a politics and a practice. Our members embrace a broad spectrum of political ideologies, but as an Alliance, we do not identify with singular labels – we are a pluralist movement.

We are reformists AND radicals, focusing on practical alternatives (e.g. community-supported agriculture, agroecology, community food initiatives, and food hubs) as a way to create ecologically-sound and socially-just food and agriculture systems. We stand against corporate-led narratives that frame structural challenges as issues of our individual behaviour, which continue to derail well-meaning efforts and discourse toward atomised and depoliticised solutions. We do so by connecting these actions with a social movement approach, integrating the goal of destroying the power structures of colonial capitalism. Without this radical transformation, practical actions are at risk of co-optation by neoliberalism.

Enacting our Theory of Change

AFSA today has evolved into a farmer-led struggle for agrarian reform and localised, socially-just food systems, and against corporate capture of governance, land, food and agriculture systems. Like our counterparts in the food sovereignty movement globally, we believe the transformation has to come from the ground up - people can’t buy from local smallholders if none exist. We believe that individuals who are not food producers also have a role to play in the transformation, not only by purchasing local produce from smallholders, but also by growing food at home or in their community, collectivising to advocate for policy reform, sharing knowledge horizontally to grow community food systems literacy, and more. The actions outlined in the Peoples’ Food Plan have relevance for everyone.

We believe transformation requires:

We do this through targeted activities, including:

Principles

The below principles guide the work of AFSA and the global movement for food sovereignty. They are foundational tenets which are supported throughout this Peoples’ Food Plan.

First Peoples First

We acknowledge the First Sunrise and those Laws and Customs within each Tribal Boundary across Australia.[29] 

The Peoples’ Food Plan comes at a critical time in Australia’s colonial history, as the Federal Government commits to reforms for Voice, Treaty, Truth in response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.[30] Respecting and promoting the sovereignty and rights of Indigenous Peoples is core to food sovereignty globally, and is reflected in AFSA’s ongoing work to decolonise our solidarity and support just relations between Indigenous and settler peoples. A First Peoples First[31] approach to food sovereignty reflects AFSA’s position that the food sovereignty movement in the colonial modern state of Australia must prioritise anti-colonial work towards reparations.

Women, youth and gender diverse peoples[32]

Yailem (Mother Earth) is our Priority, in replenishing, what Society has disgracefully robbed from her.[33] 

Government policy prioritises productivity controlled by agribusiness which results in issues and inequalities that often impact women, the gender diverse community and other marginalised groups first and hardest.

The socio-ecological transformation of food and agricultural systems in Australia must uplift women, and young and gender diverse people. Women currently make up around 32 percent of Australia’s agricultural workforce, while 24 percent are aged 35 and under.[34] 

La Vía Campesina (LVC) has mobilised an articulation of women, youth and gender diverse farmers, producers and agricultural workers from across the world to fight back against systemic violence perpetrated by agribusiness. Throughout the Peoples’ Food Plan, we put forward recommendations to include civil society representation from marginalised groups and younger generations in the development of food and agricultural policy; these groups will inherit both the challenges and opportunities of farming under climate change.

Agroecology

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) provides a clear definition of agroecology as both a science and a social movement:

Agroecology is a holistic and integrated approach that simultaneously applies ecological and social concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable agriculture and food systems. It seeks to optimize the interactions between plants, animals, humans and the environment while also addressing the need for socially equitable food systems within which people can exercise choice over what they eat and how and where it is produced. Agroecology is concurrently a science, a set of practices and a social movement and has evolved as a concept over recent decades to expand in scope from a focus on fields and farms to encompass the entirety of agriculture and food systems. It now represents a transdisciplinary field that includes the ecological, socio-cultural, technological, economic and political dimensions of food systems, from production to consumption.[35]

Given that agroecology presents viable solutions to social, ecological, political and economic crises caused by industrial agriculture, it is a pathway toward food sovereignty. Agroecology is food sovereignty in action, and food sovereignty cannot be realised without agroecology.

Localisation and solidarity economies

Against the social and ecological crises brought on by agricultural systems that are geared towards productivity and exports, localisation is considered the antidote for many of the current and future challenges we face to feed growing populations under an increasingly volatile and inhospitable climate.

In her book Who Really Feeds the World: The Failures of Agribusiness and The Promise of Agroecology,[36] Vandana Shiva explains the social and ecological value of localising food systems:

Two principles have shaped the evolution of food systems across the world. The first is that everyone must eat. The second is that every place where human beings live produces food. Between these two principles, the food systems that have evolved to nourish people are, by their very nature, local. These systems of food production nourish both biological and cultural diversity. The localisation of food is not only natural but vital, because it allows farmers to practise the Law of Return, produce more food through biodiversity, create food systems adapted to local cultures and ecologies, and nourish themselves, their communities and the soil that they give back to.[37]

For governments and corporations, viewing food systems through the lens of localisation is in direct contrast with how they understand the generation of profits that inform policies to scale up farming using competitive incentives, technology and other market mechanisms. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, biodiversity loss, and climate change in Australia reveal the fragility of a globalised food system, and should prompt policymakers to consider how agricultural policy should support localisation and solidarity economies to safeguard food security.

The Seven Pillars of Food Sovereignty

The Seven Pillars of Food Sovereignty are cross-cutting themes that shape a just transition towards food sovereignty within Australia.

Food for People (Right to Food)

The right to food entails not simply the right to sufficient food (to stay alive), but to food that is safe, nutritious, culturally-appropriate, affordable, ecologically sound, and socially just. When food is turned into commodities, the priority shifts from human and environmental health and well being to efficiency and yield. It diminishes local control of food and agriculture systems. The principle of ‘food for people’ therefore evokes the importance of relationships in food systems - food for people should by definition meet the standards of food sovereignty in a way that commodities for markets never can nor will.

The right to food also evokes a discussion of food justice. Food justice represents "a transformation of the current food system, including but not limited to eliminating disparities and inequities".[38] It demands an acknowledgement of the racial, class, gender, ability and political inequalities historically designed into our food system.[39] Food justice therefore represents the outcome of equitable, food sovereign communities which recognise the right to food as a universal right.

The right to food is set out in Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states,

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Although the Federal Government has ratified the Right to Food, the Australian Constitution does not contain provisions to ensure it meets its obligations as a signatory.[40] Food and nutrition insecurity is rising again globally after decades of decline, due to the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events, national and regional conflicts including displacement of millions of people, and increasing wealth disparity.[41] Australia is not immune - “Food insecurity is associated with poor mental and physical health with approximately 800,000 adults per year experiencing food insecurity nationally, a number that is expected to rise in 2023 and beyond.[42] ”Over 2 million households in Australia (21%) have experienced severe food insecurity in the last 12 months.”[43]

Food for People is: when people have access to fresh, ethical and ecologically-sound, localised food production, distributed through short and decentralised supply chains, and full democratic participation in the food system.

What it isn’t:

  • The marketing of First Food formulas;
  • Ultra-processed foods (UPFs), bio-fortified foods, supplements and lab-meat;
  • Reductionist nutrition advice; nor
  • Corporations ‘rounding up’ food for charity.

See False Solutions in the Right to Food section

What it looks like: See Peoples’ Actions and Peoples’ Policy Recommendations in the Right to Food section

Builds knowledge and skills (Horizontal knowledge sharing)

Where productivist food and agricultural policy encourages farmers to specialise, scale up, and outsource knowledge and inputs, localised economies support scaling out and diversifying through horizontal knowledge sharing farmer-to-farmer. Agroecology-oriented farming supports producers to effectively feed their local communities with healthy, nourishing foods, with clear boundaries where production puts a strain on ecological, social and economic limits.                                 

The fact that agroecology is based on applying principles in ways that depend on local realities means that the local knowledge and ingenuity of farmers must necessarily take a front seat. This is in contrast to conventional practices, where farmers follow pesticide and fertiliser recommendations prescribed on a recipe basis by extension agents or sales representatives.[44] 

Horizontal Knowledge sharing is: a component of solidarity economies, whereby food producers can share and build upon their experiences and skills to empower others with the knowledge to grow their own food while healing Country. It is also an important feature of healthy non-farming communities, which can empower people and support their right to food.

What it isn’t:

  • The digitalisation of agriculture;
  • Dietary guidelines and food labelling;
  • Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to solve food insecurity; nor
  • Corporate control of seeds. See False Solutions in the Technology section

What it looks like: See Peoples’ Actions and Peoples’ Policy Recommendations in the Technology section

Works with Nature

There is an ancient and ongoing 'custodial ethic' amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, “it lives and breathes with us daily. We are consistent, just like the Stars, The Sun Moon and all the Tides, we are the constant needed to reproduce, with Freedom and Certainty,”[45] and a growing one amongst agroecological and regenerative farmers in Australia, stemming from place-based understandings of Country, reactions to climate change and loss of biodiversity, and an increasing willingness to grapple with what it means to hold title to unceded sovereign lands of First Peoples (while working out local strategies towards reparations). Small-scale food producers and First Peoples here and globally are maintaining biodiversity at the genetic, species, and ecosystem levels. Living a life made in common with Nature, we conserve and sustainably use biodiversity in our care.

Working with Nature is: convivial, rejecting Western dualisms and does not consider humans as separate from Nature.

What it isn’t:

  • The commodification of Nature through Sustainable Intensification (SI) approaches;
  • The locking up of Nature through ‘rural conservation’ land use zones and other approaches to biodiversity conservation;
  • The commodification of water; nor
  • The commodification of carbon and biodiversity through environmental markets.

See False Solutions in the Land and water use (Planning Law) and Water sections

What it looks like: See Peoples’ Actions and Peoples’ Policy Recommendations for the First Peoples, Land and water use (Planning Law) and Water sections

Values food providers

Food providers - First Peoples, farmers and farm workers, fishers and fish workers, and food system workers - are rights holders under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). They have a right to a sustainable and dignified livelihood, and governments have an obligation to consult and cooperate with smallholders in good faith to protect their right to be involved in decision-making processes that may affect them. This includes rights to sustainably use natural resources to earn a livelihood, and to equitably access and control value chain infrastructure and markets.

Valuing food providers is: centering smallholders - First Peoples, farmers, fishers and food system workers - within local economies and governance systems, in order to celebrate their practices of creating food that is sacred and respectful of nature.

What it isn’t:

  • Coloniser capture of Australia’s native food industry;
  • Restricting First Peoples, smallholder and community seed exchange systems;
  • Imposing scale-inappropriate planning controls; nor
  • Imposing unfair food safety regulations.

See False Solutions in the First Peoples, Land and water use (Planning Law), Biosecurity is Biodiversity and Food Safety sections

What it looks like: See Peoples’ Actions and Peoples’ Policy Recommendations for the First Peoples, Land and water use (Planning Law), Biodiversity is Biodiversity and Food Safety sections

Localise food systems

Localised food systems are based upon Indigenous knowledges and practices, small-scale agroecological farming and human-scale direct distribution models such as community-supported agriculture (CSA) and farmers’ markets. By shortening supply chains, we reduce emissions and increase resilience in the face of climate change and the rise of pandemics. Farmers are already on it – they are building infrastructure and taking control back into community hands – but there are several policy barriers to this work to re-localise food and agriculture systems.

Puts control locally

Key to the localisation of food systems is giving First Peoples and small-scale producers and processors a central role in governance.

Using ASFA, to partner with Land Owners, Traditional Owners and Native Title Land trusts, to unlock Land Tenure, Titles and Value, to build Capacity in Local Growth, Manufacturing and Long Term Food Sovereign Projects.[46]

In addition to articles asserting rights to self-determination, Articles 18 and 19 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) assert that:

Indigenous peoples have the right to participate in decision-making in matters which would affect their rights, through representatives chosen by themselves in accordance with their own procedures, as well as to maintain and develop their own indigenous decision-making institutions.

States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them.

Article 10 of the UNDROP assures smallholders’ right to participation, stating:

States shall promote the participation, directly and/or through their representative organisations, of peasants and other people working in rural areas in decision-making processes that may affect their lives, land and livelihoods; this includes respecting the establishment and growth of strong and independent organisations of peasants and other people working in rural areas and promoting their participation in the preparation and implementation of food safety, labour and environmental standards that may affect them.

Putting control locally gives First Peoples, smallholders and local communities the right to work collectively for the common good. It also enables local communities to reject private development of public goods such as water and land that would exploit, extract, and provide profit to others outside the community to the detriment of Country.

Localising food systems and Putting control locally involves: decentring current transnational, unsustainable food systems to be more local and human-scale. Based upon Indigenous knowledges and agroecological and small-scale farming practices, these systems place control over the questions of ‘Who produces food? How? And for whom?’ into community hands.

See table for direct distribution models

What it isn’t:

  • Government policies that make decisions for First Peoples, smallholders, and local communities without their self-determined democratic participation;
  • The centralisation of distribution systems for efficiency;
  • The convenience offered by the gig economy; nor
  • The digitalisation of agriculture.

See False Solutions in the Value Chain and Technology sections

What it looks like: See Peoples’ Actions and Peoples’ Policy Recommendations for the Value Chain section

Food is sacred

Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.[47]~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Djaara woman Rebecca Phillips urged those present at a recent gathering to understand that humans are 60 per cent water, so if you drink Loddon River water, you are 60 per cent Loddon River. When you eat food grown on Country, you are part of that Country. ‘Country is kin,’ she reminded us.[48] 

Cherissma Costelloe, is currently undertaking a High Court challenge around Succession, Cannabis Use Medically, and the relationship with First Nations Australians Laws and Customs.  According to our Grandmother’s inherent Laws, we have the obligation to manage and maintain these harvests and food patency for our future generations. These Laws are Inherent, consistent and can be managed.

Understanding food as sacred renders commodity systems totally nonsensical. How can you put kin in a box and ship them halfway around the world? Humans are not machines, yet the industrialisation of our society has created a world where many act like a cog in one, simply churning a wheel to wrap plastic around another commodity to be sold and consumed somewhere far away, to no discernible genuine benefit for either the grower or the eater.

Following the long example of the First Peoples of the world, we must all reclaim just lives lived in harmony with Nature, for it is the only way to heal the cavernous metabolic rift that underlies the cascading crises we face today.

Food is Sacred is: the understanding that food and Nature are not to be seen in dichotomy with humans. It recognises that food is not a commodity but rather, a part of the land that makes humans - to First Peoples, food is kin. As such, this Pillar goes hand in hand with Works with Nature and Values food providers. Food providers who view food as sacred, and who work with, rather than against Nature, should be championed as the stewards of a kinder and more ethical food systems transition.

What it isn’t:

  • The commodification of Nature; nor
  • Genetic modification (GMO) or lab meat;

See False Solutions in the Land and water use (Planning Law) and Water sections

What it looks like: See Peoples’ Actions and Peoples’ Policy Recommendations for the First Peoples, Land and water use (Planning Law) and Water sections

The Problems: Colonialism and Capitalism

The colonial capitalist economy continues to dominate Australian food and agricultural systems. Sustained neoliberal policy agendas, characterised by free-market deregulation, privatisation, and free trade, continue to privilege industrial agricultural productivism and exports, concentrating corporate power across the food system. This has led to a collapse of global food systems, in which the system has resulted in increasingly damaging and catastrophic impacts on climate change, biodiversity loss, hunger and obesity, poverty and biosecurity which are irreversible[49].

This structural footing of Australia’s current agricultural regime is the central issue addressed in the Peoples’ Food Plan. A structure that has devastated livelihoods, culture, biodiversity, soils, and the climate, and actively suppresses alternative visions for agriculture, especially those rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems. We are living through a time of social, ecological and economic crises, and in response, the 193 member states of the UN have agreed to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for systemic transformation.[50] 

“Intensive farming has made food unprecedentedly cheap, in terms of household outlay, even as the cost to the planet spirals out of control. No one pays for the damage, so everyone does.  Environmental destruction and climate change impose a huge financial burden on the taxpayer. Yet none of this is recorded on our financial spreadsheets. It is not factored into the GDP with which we measure a nation’s economic health, or the financial statements of our companies.”[51]

55 percent of Australia’s land-mass is currently used for food production, two-thirds of which is now considered degraded.[52] 

Moreover, the scarcity of local food resources has historically driven conflict, genocide, and the mass flight of refugees from famine and war torn regions[53]. Cribb (2019) cites how:

“of the 68.5 million refugees worldwide in 2018, the vast majority were fleeing hunger. Of the 258 million economic migrants in 2017, most were educated, thoughtful people trying to escape what they regarded as the probable disintegration of their home society and build a better future for themselves and their families, primarily in countries which were more food-secure”[54]

The historical, present, and looming clash between the water, food and land needs of ever-growing populations is a fatal consequence of the colonialist capitalist food system. As such, investing in the sustainability of food systems is of key strategic importance in avoiding famine-driven conflict and the vast movement of refugees.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of the global food economy. With supermarket shelves bare and the soaring costs of food, many Australians have become vulnerable to food insecurity. For a majority of urban eaters food is from nowhere; understandings of where and how food is produced have become increasingly fragmented. Industrial agriculture is fundamentally incompatible with achieving food sovereignty, and yet currently, Australian policy settings do not reflect this. Where the Australian Government supports Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) to increase agricultural productivity and boost economic growth, AFSA asserts that we need policies that support circular and solidarity economies at a local scale. Governments must rethink unsustainable growth and trade if they plan to meet the SDGs and nourish Australia’s peoples and landscapes, all whilst  protecting the rest of the world’s right to do the same.

Governance

Small-scale farmers were historically left out of policy processes in Australia, while big agribusinesses have always had a seat at the table. Transparency of decision-making processes is lacking.

The result is that small-scale food producers are bound to unnecessary regulatory burdens and financial risk despite their ability to effectively feed communities in transparent, participatory and safe local food systems. They receive very little financial support for decentralised value chain infrastructure or business development, as the Australian Government’s focus on productivity and exports promotes major inequities in resource allocation, diverting vast sums of money to multinationals and the export industry instead of local and regional food economies.

Private agribusiness seeks to organize production and distribution of food on a global scale by influencing the structures and institutions of governance.[55]

This skewed representation has led to regulations that favour industrial food and agriculture systems over small-scale local food production, including in the formation of trade regimes.[56] In some of the worst examples, industry controls decision making directly, with serious conflicts of interest in board constitution (e.g. the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicine Authority[57] and the Climate Change Authority,[58] examples of regulatory capture).

Productivism and Exports

Post-invasion Australian farms have swung between very large operations owned by squatters to smaller family farms encouraged by government land acts to increase food production for export. Australian governments, big agribusiness and many farming advocates have been singing the productivity song for a long time. These messages accelerated in the financial deregulation of the 1980’s. Get big or get out. Produce more with less. Buy bigger machinery. Grow more tonnes. Trade in futures. Trade in water. Get rid of your collectives, cooperatives and single-desk trading platforms.[59]

Growth and exports are the enduring focus of Australian policymakers and large-scale farmers, and they are also at the root of the environmental, social, and economic issues we face. Australian farmers produce 93 percent of Australia’s food, while exporting some 72 percent of what we produce.[60] Meat producers are among the largest exporters, with on average 75 percent of beef and veal, and 73 per cent of lamb and mutton, sent offshore.[61] As governments call for higher productivity and more exports, we should ask:

Why should a highly productive, net-exporting country seek to export more of our precious soil and water in the form of commodities for the profit of a few?

Meanwhile, concerns about future food security are rising, particularly in Australia where climate change impacts are already leading to degraded and increasingly inhospitable conditions to grow food. However, Australia currently produces enough food per year to feed 80 million people, with around 72 percent exported overseas, and yet one in six Australians (17%) were considered severely food insecure in 2021.[62] It is estimated that Australia’s population will grow to 50 million by 2050 – if farmers were to keep producing food at the current rate, we’d still have surplus to feed an extra 30 million people by then. So why do we keep hearing about the promise of technology and nature-based solutions to increase agricultural yields?

The productivist and export focus is often framed within a moralising discourse that Australian agriculture is ‘feeding the world’. Yet, the reality is that exports are directed not to countries suffering widespread food insecurity, but rather the ‘highest value markets in developed economies and to the middle classes in developing countries’.[63] To take but one example of the ways in which our precious soil and water are used and shipped overseas, 26 percent of Australian agricultural water is used to irrigate cotton[64], 99 percent of which is exported[65] by 1500 farmers.[66] This means that .006 percent of the population use 26 percent of agricultural water for their own benefit, water that is increasingly needed to keep ailing rivers and ecosystems alive.

The system doesn’t benefit most farmers:

The focus on growing more has made agribusiness input companies and food processors rich, but keeps many farmers chasing their tails, which can result in their land condition going backwards. Buy more land, buy more machinery, take on more debt, require more inputs and then buy more land. Ad infinitum.[67]

La Vía Campesina, the global movement of small-scale food producers and the largest social movement in the world, puts it this way:

The promoters of the capitalist world order realise that food sovereignty is an idea that impinges on their financial interests. They prefer a world of monoculture and homogenous tastes, where food can be mass-produced using cheap labour in faraway factories, disregarding its ecological, human and social impacts. They prefer economies of scale to robust local economies. They choose a global free market (based on speculation and cut-throat competition) over solidarity economies that require more robust territorial markets (local peasant markets) and active participation of local food producers. They prefer to have land banks where industrial-scale contract farming would replace small-holder producers. They inject our soil with agro-toxics for better short-term yields, ignoring the irreversible damage to soil health. Their trawlers will again crawl the oceans and rivers, netting fishes for a global market while the coastal communities starve. They will continue to try to hijack indigenous peasant seeds through patents and seed treaties. The trade agreements they craft will again aim to bring down tariffs that protect our local economies.[68]

Free Trade Agreements

A Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is defined by the Australian Government as:

an international treaty between two or more economies that reduces or eliminates certain barriers to trade in goods and services, as well as investment. Australia negotiates FTAs to benefit Australian exporters, importers, producers and investors by reducing and eliminating certain barriers to international trade and investment.[69]

While FTAs certainly reduce barriers for increased trade to the benefit of ‘exporters, importers, [large-scale] producers, and investors’, they do so at enormous costs to farm, fish, and food system workers as labour protection laws are circumvented to increase corporate profits,[70] and corporations are given even greater power to control food systems. In Australia, much of this labour includes seasonal workers, particularly from Pacific Island countries, whose communities often rely on exploitative labour mobility schemes for remittances that lock-in extractive power dynamics.

Another immeasurable negative consequence of free trade is to privatise biodiversity (e.g. through patents on seeds), increasingly making it illegal for First Peoples and farmers to save, exchange or modify seeds from so-called protected varieties.[71] The narrowing of genetic diversity in industrial agriculture (in both seed and breed), combined with rapid trans-boundary mobility of produce - in particular meat and livestock - has created the perfect storm for what evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallaces calls ‘the NAFTA flu’ and its ilk. Industrial agriculture could not have created a more perfect breeding ground for global pandemics than sheds of immunologically compromised homogeneous animals slated for immediate export under free trade agreements if it had tried.

In 2018, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) came into force after the US failed to ratify its predecessor, the TPP. Around 23 percent of Australia’s total exports come from agricultural produce traded with countries under the CPTPP, including beef, sheepmeat, wool, pork, cereals and grains, dairy, rice, sugar, cotton, wine, horticulture, and seafood.[72] It is clear trade liberalisation and ‘new generation’ trade agreements like the CPTPP are shifting toward serving corporate profits rather than equitable prosperity.[73] They work to reinforce the already immensely tight grip of transnational food corporations and agribusiness, who claim that trade liberalisation ‘raises living standards’.[74] However, nothing is raised in an eroding local food system caused by squeezing small-scale producers, and influencing the local availability, nutritional quality, price and desirability of foods except corporate profits. Obligations under the FTA also directly conflict with Australia’s ability to achieve the SDGs, including through promoting consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPF) that underpin Australia’s non-communicable disease burden.[75] Furthermore, the CPTPP also includes changes in regulatory regimes to enable greater corporate influence in policy-making decisions, this includes investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms that allows corporations to take legal action against signatory governments to guarantee rights and protections held within the FTA.[76] Transnational corporate interests are privileged at the cost to our health, the environment, small-scale farmers and farm workers, fishers and fish workers, food system workers, and Indigenous Peoples.

Governments and corporations hold up FTAs as a measure of social and economic development, however, La Vía Campesina and other organisations globally have campaigned against corporate capture of food systems, documenting how smallholders and local communities are adversely impacted by free trade. Colonial capitalist food systems systematically fail to uphold the rights of First Peoples under UNDRIP and smallholders under UNDROP while contributing to climate change and biodiversity loss, offering short-term solutions where profit for a few is prioritised over people and planet.

Colonial Capitalist Food System Case Studies

The dumping of cheap subsidised crops in Mexico and Australia

Inseparable from the dynamics of transnational global sourcing and export-oriented agriculture has been the dumping of cheap subsidised crops onto countries, particularly in the global South.[77] Such a crisis was seen in Mexico’s asymmetrical integration into the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the subsequent flood of cheap US corn into Mexico.[78] This undercut the price of local corn and left Mexican campesinos unable to compete with US producers, who on average receive $10 billion USD in subsidies per year.[79]  This led to the displacement of millions of farmers and the 2003 against the WTO. However, this exporting of food insecurity onto other countries via dumping is not limited to less developed countries.

During 2021-2022 West Australian[80] and Queensland avocado farmers[81] were forced to dump 50-100 tonnes of Hass avocados as low prices prevented them from recouping packaging, transport and labour costs. This was due to cheap avocado imports from New Zealand undercutting domestic retail, leaving tonnes of Australian produce to rot.  In 2021 industry data found that tens of thousands of overseas fruits – or 20% of domestically sold fruit – were being sold on Australian supermarket shelves every week.[82] This meant that even as Australian avocado production reached consistent levels of self-sufficiency, farmers across the country were left suffering from a decimated local food market, and the food sovereignty of the nation was left stunted by the industry’s orientation towards exports and productivity.

Global almond boom creating unfair and ecologically damaging markets in the Murray-Darling Basin

In a race to meet international demand for almonds, almond milk and almond meal, Australia has become the world’s second largest almond supplier.[83] However, the high water intensity of the nut – 4 litres of water are required to grow 1 almond nut,[84] almost triple the water required for wheat or feed grain – has placed significant strain on the ecology and water resources of the Murray-Darling Basin, where most production is centred. A 2019 report[85] estimated that permanent almond plantations in the Basin demanded 1315 gigalitres of water annually, and suggested that future dry years would leave no irrigation water left for any other crop, other than permanent agriculture.

This industry dependence on the export monocrop furthers the region's lack of drought and climate resistance. The crisis is exacerbated by the market for water trading rights created by large producers. In 2021 the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) conducted an inquiry into the trading scheme which is fraught with market manipulation and insider trading, and which leaves smaller farmers unable to compete with rising water prices.[86] Further, the profits from these Australian grown almonds are found to be directed to the major overseas investors, such as Japanese insurance funds and Canadian and US retirement funds.[87] It highlights the lack of economic gain received by the rural communities nor Traditional Owners along the river system.

Adding to the storm is the widespread ecological damage inflicted on the Murray-Darling Basin bioregion. As the large industrial orchards strip the ground bare for more effective insecticide and fungicide application, biodiversity levels are eroded.[88] Almond pollination requires more honey bees than any other crop. Each year, commercial beekeepers export billions of European honey bees to the basin for tree flowering in late July, many of which die from the chemicals applied to the orchards.[89] Further, excess upstream diversion of water for irrigation has led to water quality issues, such as the quick dropping of temperature, death of algae and falling of oxygen below critical levels. This resulted in the tragic mass fish death events in late 2018- early 2019 and again in 2023,[90] which were estimated to range from hundreds of thousands to at least 3 million fish deceased over a 40 km stretch of the Darling River.

Such rural and ecological crises illuminate how an embracing of productivity and exports risks the livelihoods of farmers, the region’s precious resources, and the food security of Australia. It denies local food systems sovereignty over their food, land and water.

Climate change

Climate change is the largest existential threat to all living beings on Earth, and is unequivocally linked to the increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from burning fossil fuels since the rise of capitalism sparked the industrial revolution. At an international level, the UN Paris Agreement in 2015 gained the support of governments to sign on to reduce GHG emissions to net zero by 2050. At COP27 in Sharm El-Sheik,  the Australian Government endorsed the Glasgow Breakthrough Agenda on Agriculture (GBAA),[91] a goal to make ‘climate-resilient, sustainable agriculture the most attractive and widely adopted option by farmers everywhere by 2030’. In line with COP27 commitments, the Australian Government has legislated targets to reach net zero emissions by 2050, and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 43 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

However, Australia’s climate commitments are seriously undermined by its reliance on carbon credits to meet emissions reductions targets. The Safeguard Mechanism currently allows emitters to offset 100 percent of their emissions through the purchase of carbon credits, and according to the Australia Institute, as much as 80 percent of credits are ‘junk’, leading to very little or no real carbon sequestration at all.[92] 

AFSA and its members promote the application of agroecology to address the climate crisis, as detailed in the next chapter. Agroecology is both a movement and a practice that works with nature to enhance biodiversity and restore agricultural land and water, sequestering carbon and producing systems that are more resilient in the face of escalating climate-change-induced natural disasters.

Biodiversity loss

Biodiversity for food and agriculture is all the plants and animals - wild and domesticated - that provide food, feed, fuel and fibre. It is also the myriad of organisms that support food production – called ‘associated biodiversity.’[93] This includes all the plants, animals and microorganisms (such as insects, bats, birds, mangroves, corals, seagrasses, earthworms, soil-dwelling fungi and bacteria) that keep soils fertile, pollinate plants, purify water and air, keep fish and trees healthy, and fight crop and livestock pests and diseases.

 

Australia is among the top seven countries worldwide responsible for 60 percent of the world's biodiversity loss between 1996 and 2008, and we are now facing the sixth mass extinction event in 4.6 billion years.[94]

 

Agricultural biodiversity is disappearing most rapidly,[95] as industrial agriculture, forestry, and fisheries systems use homogeneous, proprietary seeds, trees, breeds and aquatic species, scientifically bred and genetically modified to include limited traits, which are useful to industry. They are grown in simplified agroecosystems that are heavily contaminated with biocides and other agrochemicals.

 

Of some 6,000 plant species cultivated for food, fewer than 200 contribute substantially to global food output, and only nine account for 66 percent of total crop production. The world’s livestock production is based on about 40 animal species, with only a handful providing the vast majority of meat, milk and eggs. Of the 7,745 local breeds of livestock reported globally, 26 percent are at risk of extinction. Nearly a third of fish stocks are overfished, more than half have reached their sustainable limit.[96]

 

Wild food species and many species that contribute to ecosystem services that are vital to food and agriculture, including pollinators, soil organisms and natural enemies of pests, are rapidly disappearing.

The production of a constantly narrowing range of species and breeds of animals and plants is leading to serious biosecurity risks. One of the most significant risks is from intensive livestock production, and the expansion of industrial agriculture into remote areas of forest, giving rare pathogens new opportunities to access vulnerable hosts, and leading to new and more virulent strains of influenza and coronaviruses such as COVID-19. But it is not just zoonotic disease that is on the rise from industrial agriculture systems, we are also seeing plagues of invasive pests and the rise of ‘superweeds’, weeds that have evolved characteristics that make them more difficult to control as a result of repeatedly using the same management tactic, most notably herbicides. As long as we have a production system that is nearly completely reliant on herbicides for weed management, herbicide resistant weeds will remain a serious threat to agriculture.

Waste

The very concept of waste itself is baked into linear production chains underpinning Australia’s dominant food regime. From the excessive application of agrochemicals that decimates waterways to the abundance of single-use packaging that chokes ecosystems, waste within the food system occurs on every step.

Food waste costs around $36.6 billion to the Australian economy per year despite the fact that an increasing number of Australians are facing food insecurity.[97] 25 percent of water used in agriculture grows food that is ultimately wasted,[98] $5.2 billion worth of food is thrown out every year,[99] and 1.9 million tonnes of packaging waste is discarded annually.[100]

The drivers: industrial agriculture and the corporatisation of food environments. Let's consider UPFs, a core product of the industrial food complex - see ‘Technology’ chapter. Compared to any other food category, UPFs make up the largest portion of household food waste, have the highest diet-related water consumption, and account for the primary portion of diet-related energy use[101] (considering the entire life cycle: raw materials, processing, packaging, and distributing). Industrial monocultures used for UPF production degrade precious ecological resources such as the quality of water and soils, and this wasteful maltreatment of land accounts for a third of food-related land use in Australia.[102]

Waste is inevitable in a productivist system incentivised to ignore externalities. To change this reality governments must understand that waste is a byproduct of a broader broken food system, and therefore the most effective way to address waste would be to mend the entire system. Here we will outline why agroecology is the most promising path toward this future, and how we can all start walking it.


The Solution: Agroecology

Context                                

The industrial system proposes to address the cascading crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, hunger and obesity, poverty, and biosecurity threats with more technology and the development of new so-called environmental markets (carbon and biodiversity being the primary markets, but with recent additions of reef credits and plastic credits[103] joining the list of false solutions). This increasing financialisation of nature is worse than band-aids on cancer, it is fighting cancer with cancer. The current economic system is fundamentally inequitable - capitalism is built on the exploitation of land and labour and the endless pursuit of profit (as opposed to livelihood). Agroecology, on the other hand, mends the ‘metabolic rift’[104] created by capitalism, by healing farmers and local communities’ relations with land and each other.

Overwhelming evidence shows ‘that a transition to an agriculture based on agroecological principles would not only provide rural families with significant social, economic, and environmental benefits, but would also feed the world, equitably and sustainably’.[105] The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has identified the ways that agroecology can bring solutions to several SDGs, including:

The evidence base is strong enough that agroecological principles are now also embedded in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted by nearly 200 countries at COP15 in December 2022.[107]                 

AFSA members practise agroecological and regenerative farming practices, with most increasingly aligning themselves with agroecology - a scientifically and experientially justified practice of agriculture that is sensitive to the ecosystems in which it is situated and that fosters the democratic participation of all peoples in the food system. Its original and still predominant practitioners are Indigenous Peoples and peasant smallholders the world over. For a full discussion of what is meant by the terms ‘agroecology’ and ‘regenerative agriculture’, see further below in this chapter.

Governance and Participation

Agroecology promotes the participation of small-scale food producers, Indigenous Peoples and local communities in decision-making processes at all levels. Amongst its 13 Principles[108] are ‘land and natural resource governance’, advocating for strong institutional arrangements to include the recognition and support of First Peoples and smallholders as sustainable managers of natural and genetic resources; and ‘participation’, encouraging self-organisation by smallholders to support decentralised governance and locally adaptive management of agricultural and food systems.

Article 2.3 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) directs States:

…before adopting and implementing legislation and policies, international agreements and other decision-making processes that may affect the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas, States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with peasants other people working in rural areas through their own representative institutions, engaging with and seeking the support of peasants and other people working in rural areas who could be affected by decisions before those decisions are made, and responding to their contributions, taking into consideration existing power imbalances between different parties and ensuring active, free, effective, meaningful and informed participation of individuals and groups in associated decision-making processes.

Agroecology fundamentally aims to promote the deep ecological, social, and economic knowledge of First Peoples, peasants, and other small-scale food producers and custodians of land. It puts decision making power back in the hands of Indigenous Peoples, smallholders, and local communities. It achieves this through 13 principles of agroecology:

The Five Levels of Transition Towards Sustainable Food Systems and the Related 13 Principles of Agroecology

  1. Recycling. Preferentially use local renewable resources and close as far as possible resource cycles of nutrients and biomass.
  2. Input reduction. Reduce or eliminate dependency on purchased inputs and increase self-sufficiency.
  3. Soil health. Secure and enhance soil health and functioning for improved plant growth, particularly by managing organic matter and enhancing soil biological activity.
  4. Animal health. Ensure animal health and welfare.
  5. Biodiversity. Maintain and enhance diversity of species, functional diversity and genetic resources and thereby maintain overall agroecosystem biodiversity in time and space at field, farm and landscape scales.
  6. Synergy. Enhance positive ecological interaction, synergy, integration and complementarity amongst the elements of agroecosystems (animals, crops, trees, soil and water).
  7. Economic diversification. Diversify on-farm incomes by ensuring that small-scale farmers have greater financial independence and value addition opportunities while enabling them to respond to demand from consumers.
  8. Co-creation of knowledge. Enhance co-creation and horizontal sharing of knowledge including local and scientific innovation, especially through farmer-to-farmer exchange.
  9. Social values and diets. Build food systems based on the culture, identity, tradition, social and gender equity of local communities that provide healthy, diversified, seasonally and culturally-appropriate diets.
  10. Fairness. Support dignified and robust livelihoods for all actors engaged in food systems, especially small-scale food producers, based on fair trade, fair employment and fair treatment of intellectual property rights.
  11. Connectivity. Ensure proximity and confidence between producers and consumers through promotion of fair and short distribution networks and by re-embedding food systems into local economies.
  12. Land and natural resource governance. Strengthen institutional arrangements to improve, including the recognition and support of family farmers, smallholders and peasant food producers as sustainable managers of natural and genetic resources.
  13. Participation. Encourage social organisation and greater participation in decision-making by food producers and consumers to support decentralised governance and local adaptive management of agricultural and food systems.[109]

Degrowth and Connectivity: small-scale farming already feeds the world

Around 70 percent of food in the world is grown by small-scale food producers on small plots of land, with the remaining 30 percent grown by large-scale industrial farms,[110] which are responsible for 75 percent of ecological destruction from farming.[111] Beyond farming, 20 percent of the world’s population uses 80 percent of its resources.[112] Clearly the Minority World (aka the Global North) is using more than its share, and something has to change.

Agroecology promotes the ‘radical abundance’ which ensures sufficiency for all possible through degrowth, ‘demanding the “end of the scarcity capitalism produces through waste, hoarding, and privatisation”.[113] This form of abundance is ‘radically different from the bourgeois form of material wealth that is inevitably based on ever-increasing productivity and endless mass consumption of commodities’.[114] Central to degrowth is the principle of connectivity, which ensures proximity and trust between producers and eaters through fair and short (often direct) supply chains, and by re-embedding food systems in local economies.                  

A note on ‘agroecology’ and ‘regenerative agriculture’

Regenerative agriculture is promoted as a solution to the ills of our time, and while its ecological work is important, it is ultimately partial rather than transformative because of its relatively technocratic rather than paradigmatic approach, and its lack of a coherent political framework (Tittonell et al. 2022).[115] While the majority of farmers who align with regenerative agriculture in Australia are committed to farming in closer harmony with nature, until it breaks up with the capitalist economy, much of what is promoted as regenerative is, put simply, capitalist agriculture with better inputs.

In a critical way regenerative agriculture is repeating the errors of the organics movement. Organics started as a movement and became an industry, commodified and consolidated because the sector lacked a collective vision to unshackle itself from capitalist food systems. As a movement, regenerative agriculture does not articulate a theory of change for economic, social or political transformation, and it is growing a new generation of so-called experts and gurus who profit from teaching the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ or ‘why’. This is a critical juncture for regenerative agriculture– can it shift to teaching the ‘what’ and ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’? Will a model that doesn’t outsource everything including knowledge emerge with more grassroots horizontal knowledge sharing? Will regenerative agriculture accept the challenge to think and advocate beyond farm boundaries to the broader social, cultural, ecological and political economies within which farmers care for Country?

Agroecology is built on peasants’ and Indigenous Peoples’ ways of thinking and being. Peasants and Indigenous Peoples throughout history have engaged in co-production with nature on a self-controlled resource base, with a sustained use of ecological heritage, reliance on (mostly) family labour, and relations of reciprocity. A core value is sustenance for and reproduction of the farm unit and family.

When farmers undergo a transition from input-dependent farming to agroecology based on local resources, they are becoming “more peasant”’,[116] and peasants fundamentally grow food, not commodities. Moves away from external dependencies and towards local inter-dependencies include ‘a renewed emphasis on cooperation and strengthening rural communities.[117] 

Re-peasantisation is therefore a foundational aspect of an agroecological transition away from capitalist agriculture. Call it whatever you want – our movements must transform the social, economic and political systems surrounding our farm ecosystems to achieve a food sovereign future for all.

Kombumerri philosopher Mary Graham and many other Indigenous thinkers stress the need to ‘locate’ oneself, to have a relationship with land in order to listen and learn to be a good custodian[118]. Local, place-based solutions solve problems in the places where they occur – hopefully before they occur. Short and direct value chains reduce emissions and increase resilience in the face of climate change and the rise of pandemics. Smallholders around the world are re-building value chain infrastructure and taking control back into community hands (e.g. rice and grain mills, abattoirs, dairy processing facilities). La Vía Campesina and its member organisations such as AFSA are helping to show the way – through horizontal knowledge exchanges and valuing traditional knowledges of smallholders and Indigenous Peoples, and by collectivising our efforts to lobby the state for legislative reform that enables an agroecological transition.        

The term agroecology was coined by Russian agronomist Basil Bensin in 1930, and the practice emerged as a social movement in Mexico in the 1970s in resistance to the Green Revolution,[119] before being taken up as a pillar of the food sovereignty movement from the 1990s onwards. There has been an explosion of publications in the last decade that coincided with the FAO process and series of global and regional symposia on agroecology commencing in 2014.[120] Agroecology’s place within the concept of ‘nature’s matrix,’ in which biodiversity, conservation, food production and food sovereignty are all interconnected goals[121] represents a stark contrast to ‘land-sparing’ arguments that posit humans as separate from and antithetical to the health of functional ecosystems.[122] 

What are the barriers to an agroecological transition?

Presently there are economic, political, and cultural lock-ins that limit capacity and opportunities for a just transition to agroecology. Some of the implications of neoliberal agriculture policies for agroecology in Australia include:

In turn, enabling dynamics for an agroecological transition include:

All of the above enablers are currently coalescing under:

People and our governments generally want to build a future that is fair for all, but can be stuck in old ways of thinking and doing that make it difficult to know how to build that future. The Peoples’ Food Plan provides a strong, evidence-based analysis of the problems and context, identifies the false solutions proposed by those trying to maintain power and the unfair hoarding of social wealth, shares peoples’ and communities’ grassroots actions, shows how our educational institutions can shift paradigms to do better work for the public good, and details policy interventions that could enable the agroecological transition we so desperately need.

False Solutions

Peoples’ Actions

What can I do?

What can my community do?

Collectivise, organise, act!

What can schools do?

What can universities do?

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations

Local Governments

State Governments

The Federal Government

Case Studies

Green Gate Organic Farm, NSW

Green Gate Organic Farm is a 200-hectare action research project established through the National Environment Centre (NEC), a vocational education facility in the Riverina Institute, NSW. The NEC offers an on-farm diploma of organic farming and diploma of permaculture, through which students become part of Green Gate's management team. The farm has been certified organic for 16 years and operates a complex agroecological system guided off the energy cycles and nutrient flows of the land. This system includes: vaccination-free damara (african fat tail sheep) rotated off the land and packed by the local butcher; eggs, produced by chickens housed in mobile trailers; honey-producing bees, which pollinate other tree, fruit (figs) and vegetable (olive) crops; shitake mushrooms grown from logs; wheats, oats and spelt harvested in a 4-5 year rotation and milled on-farm; and pork, rotated across the farm for harvesting energy and protein from biomass. Swales are used to keep water in the landscape during long dry seasons, whilst agroforestry design principles are used to modify farm microclimates and improve climate resilience. All produce is sold to the local community through their on-farm shop, which helps maintain strong relationships between the community and the food and farmers. Green Gate also hosts local Landcare groups, and provides tours for schools and farmer groups across NSW and VIC as further outreach opportunities.

Agroecology and food sovereignty curriculum - Victorian Government, Australia

The Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) is the certificate that the majority of students in Victoria receive upon completion of their secondary education. The VCE provides pathways to further study or training at university or TAFE and to employment. The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) has piloted the VCE Food Studies Design 2017-2022 to include a unit on food issues, challenges and futures where students can explore the role of AFSA and other collectives to understand how agroecology and food sovereignty can be applied to complex social and ecological crises.[136] 

Agroecology Dialogues (AFSA farmers)

An increasing number of AFSA farmer members (led initially by AFSA National Committee members) are offering agroecology dialogues on their farms, which provide a day of horizontal knowledge sharing about the science, the practices, and the social movement of agroecology. For two examples, see Jonai Farms[137] and Echo Valley’s programs, which take participants through their systems of production, on-farm value chain infrastructure, land sharing with young farmers, CSA, and participation in the food sovereignty movement with targeted lobbying for policy reform at local, state, and global levels.

Agroecology Beacon: Tumpinyeri Growers and Jonai Farms

Jonai Farms and Tumpinyeri Growers have a landsharing agreement on Dja Dja Wurrung Country (djandak) to share land, resources, labour, and community to run our respective and integrated small-scale enterprises raising pastured pigs and cattle, and fruit and vegetables. We value relationships over transactions, and reflect on our relationships with djandak to help guide our relationships with each other, other farmers and suppliers, and the communities we feed.

 

The agreement includes landsharing for farming and also for living. The principles are based on exchanges of various kinds of value - social, ecological, economic, and cultural - where all parties aim to provide and receive value commensurate with use and need. We acknowledge the privilege that Jonai have in ‘owning’ title to unceded sovereign land, and seek through a rent-free landsharing agreement and in our daily practices to break down imbalances in power or fairness in our relations with each other and with djandak.

 

There is a largely institutional development towards ‘Agroecology Lighthouses’ championed by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and NGOs intended to signal the way forward to the agroecological transition so needed to deal justly with future generations. We prefer ‘beacon’ rather than ‘lighthouse’, as lighthouses were developed to keep trade moving through the night in the endless pursuit of profit, and lighthouses are lonely places that tell travellers to stay away. Beacons, on the other hand, are lit by communities to show the way – they can be beacons of hope, and beacons of love. The Agroecology Beacon is working steadily to contribute to the rapidly growing movement of beacons all around the world, where smallholders are radically transforming the food system from the ground up, while paying the rent and working towards reparations with First Peoples.

CET Agroecology Lighthouse - Bio-Bio region, Chile

Established in the 1980s, the Chilean NGO, Centro de Educacion y Tecnologia (CET), has helped peasant farmers and peasants maintain year-round food self-sufficiency in the Bio-Bio region.[138] Their rural development programs involve several 0.5 ha model farms engaged in spatial and temporal rotational sequences of forage, vegetable crops, fruit trees, animals. This division of the land into many small fields of equal productive capacity has allowed the farms to achieve relatively constant annual production (around 6 tonnes of useful biomass from 13 different crop species). For a typical family of five, these agroecologically designed farms are able to yield 83 kg of fresh vegetables each month and produce a surplus of US$790, even after satisfying 95% of the families nutritional needs. Over a span of 20 years, no less than 130,000 campesinos, students and technicians (estimated to be no less than ⅓ of Chile’s small farmers) have visited the Bio-Bio demonstration farms. CET has helped transform the Bio-Bio region into a leading example of a community which protects peasant food sovereignty, localises food systems and promotes the sacred and ecologically just production of food. This impact has led the CET to be categorised as an ‘agroecology lighthouse’ or a demonstration site from which agroecological principles and lessons radiate out on to the broader rural community.[139] 

Melbourne Montessori - The Farm Experience[140]

The provision of opportunities in Montessori schools to involve students in farm programs are not new. Indeed, for the vast majority of schools, this is integral to their education program. Maria Montessori wrote of the opportunities that working on the land give to young people, and described it as ‘an introduction both to nature and to civilisation, and giving a limitless field for scientific and historical studies.’[141] 

With the benefits of a farm program undisputed, the challenge became deciding what the program would look like for us, and finding solutions to the logistical challenge of having limited land in a residential urban environment. Several individual teachers had attempted a small ‘urban farm’ on the campus with mixed results. A green house and planter boxes were used by a small group of students to grow herbs and vegetables, and these were in turn sold within our Microeconomy program. The school also made use of a local NFP ‘Children’s Farm’, and this provided a limited opportunity to experience ‘farm life’ through contact with animals and horticulture.

The feedback from staff and students is that they wanted a greater authentic experience – ‘an opportunity to learn both academically and through actual experience.’[142] A new proposal where students would camp and work on a local farm was developed. Tim Dewar used a contact to gain access to a property on the outskirts of Melbourne, and the ‘Farm Experience’ concept was born.

The two high level goals were: to allow students to experience authentic farm life, and to provide a prepared environment for an enriched academic experience. ‘Jonno the Farmer’ worked with us to develop a program on his property. The logistics of taking 34 ‘city kids’ to a farm and camping for a week were complex. Tents, cooking equipment, port-a-loos and access to fresh water needed to be sourced. Risk assessments and insurance for activities such as feeding and learning about animals, wood splitting, fencing, tree planting, fire mitigation and woodwork were completed and approved. Teachers completed safety training on using equipment, and a program was developed.

The exciting part from the teacher’s perspective was the development of educational opportunities in the prepared farm environment. Students completed three main activities around Maths, Science and Humanities. The Maths program involved students putting on the gumboots and completing a seismic investigation of the creek to enable an examination of volume and rate of water flow. Our Science teacher led an experiment where they examined different burning rates and reactions of substances using the campfire. Our Humanities teacher really came out of left field, leading some interpretive dance as a way of looking at river processes and landform. Lesson plans for future excursions have been developed, with the farm living up to expectations as a rich source of educational opportunities.

Overall, we were happy with our first Farm Experience. We travelled to a local indoor aquatic centre every second day to use their showers and have some fun group activities with the students, and this ‘return to humanity’ was well received. Student reflections showed that they enjoyed the Farm Experience and were challenged in a range of areas. The challenge for the future is securing a continuing relationship with the farm which will enable long-term activities such as raising our own animals, or planting and harvesting fruit trees and crops. Whilst Maria Montessori talked about the farm being ideally a boarding school model, the academic, social and emotional outcomes of our week-long Farm Experience for our students have ensured a regular place in our school calendar.

Reading the Peoples’ Food Plan

The Peoples’ Food Plan is structured in a way that aims to give policymakers, farmers, educators and allies a clear snapshot of why we need urgent food and agricultural transformation in Australia. AFSA asserts that current crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and biodiversity loss expose the fragility of industrial agriculture and global food chains, while also presenting governments with an opportunity to improve social and ecological outcomes through farming and localised food economies.

In each section of the Plan, AFSA provides context for key policy issues related to food systems and agriculture in Australia, followed by what the food sovereignty movement deems ‘false solutions’ pushed by agribusiness. We then put forward Peoples’ Actions from the ground up, offering guided actions for individuals, communities, collectives, schools and universities as well as policy recommendations for government across all levels to clear a pathway towards food sovereignty. Case studies from Australia and around the world are included in each section, to support how policy can enable socio-ecological benefits in food and agriculture systems. The case studies demonstrate how the Seven Pillars of Food Sovereignty and the 13 Principles of Agroecology already exist within the domestic and global food system.

A note on communities vs. collectives

Throughout the Peoples’ Food Plan, we offer ground-up actions from individual level right through to the Federal Government. Within the Peoples’ Actions, we refer to communities and collectives as key actors in the growing food sovereignty movement.

Communities refer to the places and spaces in which individuals belong, whether it be place-based in terms of a local community or identity-based such as farmers being part of the agricultural community or permies as part of the permaculture community.

On the other hand, collectives refer to a more formalised network of individuals or organisations who work collaboratively towards a common goal or purpose towards system transformation. For example, AFSA is a democratically-constituted membership-based collective of farmers and allies working towards socially-just and ecologically-sound food systems.

Using the Peoples’ Food Plan

The Peoples’ actions and Peoples’ policy recommendations are structured in a way that enables a shared language and common goal to achieve radical food system transformation. We intend that anyone writing a submission to governments to advocate for food sovereignty in the development of food and agricultural policy to lift recommendations from this Plan, and amplify our collective voice. We welcome anyone to take our recommendations and use them as a government engagement tool!

For individuals, communities, collectives, schools and universities, the Peoples’ actions can also be used in the development of programs and activities to enable grassroots actions towards food sovereignty. Of course, policymakers can also just cut and paste the peoples’ recommendations into policy reform!

What do we mean by ‘false solutions’?

False solutions are measures that propose to address climate change, biodiversity loss, hunger, poverty, and other global crises that fail to address the economic, social and ecological roots of the crises caused by colonial capitalism. They may offer a short-term improvement, and are often framed in a way that deceives people with high tech and undemocratic approaches. These failures have the potential to create further social and ecological destruction, felt by marginalised communities first and foremost.

False solutions include technologies and policies at a global, national and sub-national level, that:

Examples of false solutions include: carbon and biodiversity markets; ultra-processed plant-based meat alternatives and lab meat; the digitalisation of agriculture; genetic engineering; Bioenergy and Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS); geoengineering technologies; offset schemes such as REDD and Net Zero; Green Economy and Blue Economy.[143]

First Peoples

Context

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples occupy a unique position as the First Peoples of this Country - what is now known as Australia - and as the custodians of Country for millennia. It is through their custodial ethic, ‘an ancient reciprocal relationship with nature; an ethic of looking after, stewardship, caring for, and the obligation to look after land’[144] that First Peoples were, and continue to be, nurtured and sustained by the land. Country and People are one.

First Peoples have long articulated colonialism’s effect on Country: that it is hurt, and in need of healing. As we attempt to reset relations, we know that healing happens from the ground up, for ‘when you heal Country, you heal yourself’[145]. These Indigenous relations with Country direct us to understand the ultimate life-giving, nourishing and nurturing role of Country in providing food.

It is only when non-Indigenous people realise that our system, while bringing certain material benefits to us, is ultimately imperilling our survival because it is attended by ‘ecocide’ (destruction of the environment) that we will begin to act and to turn to Indigenous people as a resource to value and to learn something from (Robbie Thorpe, interview).[146]

Global food systems have been failing people for a long time, and the voices of Indigenous Peoples are often excluded from the conversations of sustainable food systems that they should be driving. Food sovereignty centres knowledges that are place-based, offering a political vision and framework for asserting everyone’s right to nutritious and culturally-appropriate food produced and distributed in ethical and ecologically sound ways, and our right to democratically determine our own food and agriculture systems.[147]

Indigenous knowledges and land management principles and practices should be prioritised, embraced and incorporated in a substantive sense into all proposed policy reforms for food security and land and water use in Australia, with full self-determined participation of and leadership from First Peoples.

A part of the urgent need for truth-telling of the impacts of colonisation on land, peoples, water and biodiversity in Australia is the story of our food systems. It is a catch-all, in that all relate to the production of food. The need to acknowledge and respect Indigenous ways of relating to land and water, as well as many Indigenous land and water management practices, is therefore manifest.         

Valuing the earth and the raw materials it provides for us is central to conservative economics. What is smart about eliminating the resource? [...] Every product we use must be stamped with our determination that our great-grandchildren can enjoy them in the future. This means our care must be extended to soil, water, food and the products we have created from the resources of the earth. [148]

Settler Clare Land, a long-time supporter of Aboriginal struggles and author of Decolonising Solidarity,[149] asserts that non-indigenous people in Australia should not see their efforts as ‘helping Aboriginal people’[...] ‘but rather seeing their/our interests served in solidarity work, to the extent that to change the system that also oppresses some non-indigenous people in one dimension or more’[150]. Similarly, settler academic Lorenzo Veracini writes of the fight against colonialism as core to working for a better world for everyone:          

                                                                          

I am fighting against colonialism for a better life: my life, and that of my children and that of those in my community. This life; not another one that I will not have. I am a co-belligerent, not an ally.[151]

Many non-indigenous people and social movements have sought to be good allies to Indigenous struggles since colonisation over 230 years ago, but there is a history and ongoing risk of non-indigenous people failing to focus on the priorities of First Peoples themselves. For example, the temptation to focus on what seems most important to an organisation like AFSA, such as injustices in planning legislation, does not address the social impacts of loss of Country, deaths in custody or economic injustices that may be First Peoples’ key priorities. This underscores the need to continually listen, read, and seek regular Indigenous input and leadership for the food sovereignty movement’s advocacy for First Peoples, and our work to promote just relations between Indigenous and settler peoples.

Issue: Loss of Country and Right to Land

While Native Title and land rights legislation has provided access to some 44 percent of land to Indigenous ownership or management, the freehold title held by urban and rural landowners extinguishes Native Title rights, which is the typical situation along the more temperate eastern and southeastern seaboard, where Aboriginal People continue to be largely alienated from traditional lands. This is a situation that a growing number of agroecological and regenerative farmers, with the support of AFSA, are actively working to address through a growing diversity of landsharing and landback initiatives, while acknowledging the complexity of their position farming on unceded sovereign lands.

Issue: Loss of Indigenous Food Sovereignty

In Australia, the impacts of colonisation have meant a severe disruption to the health, diet and well being of First Peoples that continues today. While most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people live in urban areas, they also comprise the greatest proportion of people who reside in remote areas.

Until invasion, all food was local food in what is now called Australia, but with the widespread importation and adoption of colonial foods most indigenous foodways have been largely destroyed. This begs the question today of ‘what is local food?’ and forces an examination in the food sovereignty movement of ‘who has a right to grow, eat, and benefit from the sale of native foods?’ Ensuring Indigenous food sovereignty at a minimum requires that we answer the latter with assurances of First Peoples’ access to and control over indigenous foods. Non-indigenous Australians should also ensure that benefits gained from cultivation or harvesting of indigenous plants and animals are shared with First Peoples, who are the Original Custodians of Country and all she supports, and rights holders under the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).[152] 

Food insecurity is acknowledged to be a major problem experienced in many Aboriginal communities - urban, regional, and remote. Five core areas impacting on food security have been identified:

Rather than enabling First Peoples’ full rights to enjoying a life on and with Country, the current food system in regional and remote areas across Australia sees food (often low quality and highly processed) trucked and flown in from interstate markets and sold via retail outlets at unaffordable prices - up to 30 percent higher than in major cities. ‘In remote areas, 20 percent of Indigenous people aged 12 years and over reported no usual daily fruit intake and 15 percent reported no usual daily intake of vegetables,’[154] and rates of diet-induced non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease are significantly higher in remote communities than urban areas.[155]

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are also disproportionately affected by poor quality drinking water. A 2022 report states that undrinkable water has been, and continues to be, an ongoing issue in many First Peoples’ communities.[156] Specific issues include: water exceeding Australian Drinking Water Guidelines for various substances (including uranium, arsenic, fluoride, manganese and nitrate); over 500 remote communities lacking any form of water quality monitoring; poor maintenance and routine failure of water assets; aesthetic problems such as colour, taste, and smell, which can cause people to turn to alternative sources of hydration such as soft drinks; and increasing instability of water sources as a result of climate change.

Issue: Loss of Biodiversity

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, Country is kin. Therefore, biodiversity is safeguarded where Indigenous land management is prioritised and First Peoples are the main or equal decision-makers, and the UN provides evidence that, globally, Indigenous Peoples and local communities are the best custodians of biodiversity.[157] This is well-founded in literature regarding food production, and is a key organising principle of agroecology and the food sovereignty movement (see more: Agroecology and Biodiversity is Biosecurity).

Issue: Loss of Rights to Traditional Knowledge and Genetic Resources

It is important that any consideration of Indigenous food and land management practices should be coupled with a rights-based framework that upholds the principles enshrined in the Nagoya Protocol[158] (ensuring free and prior consent before the use of traditional knowledges or genetic materials, and sharing of benefits from the use of either), and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).  

Article 26 of UNDRIP states that ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired.’ It directs states to give legal recognition to these territories. AFSA asserts that the Federal Government has not recognised these rights in several cases where First Peoples have been barred from accessing their traditional lands, marine and terrestrial waters for sustenance and livelihood. For example, in the case of the Yuin Peoples ongoing battles to dive for abalone on the south coast of NSW.[159] 

The example of fire has gained attention in recent years, particularly since the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-2020. Bill Gammage writes of the ancient alliance of people and fire in Country: Future Fire, Future Farming (2022), his co-authored book with Bruce Pascoe:

Fire is a totem, and it can influence totems by allocating plants to totems according to their flammability. It appears in Songlines, sometimes is decisive in them, but unlike all Creation except people it is not particular to any of them. Instead it is an instrument of Law, as people are. Fire and people need and help each other. Without people there would be no fire; without fire there would be no people. Both need the rest of Creation, but together they envelop Country and Dreaming alike, in a perpetual alliance on which all the rest depends.[160]

As is happening in many other parts of the country, Djaara (Dja Dja Wurrung People) through DJAARA (the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation) and their land management branch Djandak are seeing the positive ecological and health benefits of practising dhelkunya dja / making Country healthy through cultural burns.[161]

Placing Indigenous Peoples’ sovereignty first embraces the principles of food sovereignty, and neither works to the mutual exclusion of the other. In practice, we are working with farmers and allies who are embracing and espousing a custodial ethic to understand how they are currently, or may in future, be able to extend their active care for land to care for its Original Custodians, bringing settler descendants full circle to find ways and means of restitution of land and rights to First Peoples. It is a priority for AFSA to listen to First Peoples at every opportunity for guidance, as well as embracing custodial ethics, locating our practices in relationships of mutual obligation with both land and people, and expressing solidarities with the Original Custodians.

Paying the rent offers a monetary contribution towards redistributive justice, acknowledging that sovereignty was never ceded. It is part of a process that non-indigenous people and governments – individually and collectively – can enter into if we are to move towards just relations between Indigenous and settler peoples.

False Solutions

Peoples’ Actions

What can I do?

What can my community do?

Collectivise, organise act!

What can schools do?

What can universities do?

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations

Local Governments

State Governments

The Federal Government

Case Studies

Hope for Health[174] 

In Australia, the case for localisation also answers a call to recognise First Peoples’ sovereignty at the heart of food and agricultural transformation. First Peoples have effectively managed and cared for land and water for over 60,000 years, where traditional knowledge can be used to revive native foodways and support localised food systems. Hope for Health was established in 2013 by Yolngu woman, Dianne Biritjalawuy, to address the increasing health crisis of First Peoples relying on highly-processed foods due to limited accessibility. Dianne’s own experience with poor health led her to reconnect with local native foods through traditional knowledge.

Through her own experience with poor health and chronic illness, Dianne raised AU$60,000 to bring twelve Yolngu women to a local health retreat to share in the knowledge and experience of addressing chronic health problems, and reconnecting with traditional foodways. In August 2015, the cross-cultural education group Why Warriors, which aims to bridge the cultural gaps between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, received grant money to train local Yolngu as nutrition and exercise coaches. These women are now providing the community with local-language workshops and classes in cooking and health, all based on the Yolngu traditional diet. They are also working to establish a Hope for Health Centre, which will sell locally-produced foods and teach traditional methods of food preparation, thus providing opportunities that can help empower the entire Yolngu community.

First Nations Bushfood and Botanical Alliance[175] 

The First Nations Bushfood and Botanical Alliance Australia was established as a result of the national conversation that took place amongst 120 First Nations attendees at the inaugural Indigenous Native Foods Symposium in November 2019.  

​Conversation at the Symposium identified that in 2019, First Peoples represented fewer than 2% of the providers across the supply chain and acknowledged that nearly 98% of Aboriginal land owners aspire to be leaders in the native food industry. ​A National Indigenous Bushfood Statement[176] was issued at the end of the Symposium which had a number of actions including forming this national First Nations lead industry body:

As custodians of our Country, we must take a leadership role. We must be included in any development of our native plants and animals in the bushfood, botanical, agricultural and medicinal and therapeutic industries. We believe that our effective participation in the industry, its growth and development has the power to bring social, cultural, economic and environmental benefits for all. Our leadership, bringing our Knowledge systems and values, will make a strong contribution to food security and a sustainable future for country and people – as it has for generations before us.

The Alliance works to deliver the key action items coming out of the Symposium which are:

  • Implementing protocols to set national standards on how to work with First Nations people in the industry;
  • Provenance and authenticity: to protect First Nation producers, respect our protocols and recognise our custodianship;
  • Changes to the law: to respect and protect First Nations knowledge in bushfoods and bush products should be protected by the laws of this land and business practice. This includes intellectual property; penalties for misappropriation and implementation of the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing; and
  • Education and Awareness: promote respect for our First Nations Knowledge values and protocols.

Yaamarra & Yarral[177] (Gamilaraay self-determination and food sovereignty)

A Gamilaraay led enterprise to resurrect the Gamilaraay people’s ancient grain economy and flip agriculture on its head

 

The Gamilaraay people and their neighbours in the Northern Murray-Darling Basin once managed vast luxuriant grasslands which were resilient and adapted to our variable environment. These grasslands could be activated into food systems of abundance under the right conditions, allowing for the harvest of edible grains.

 

The vibrant cultural practice and reciprocity, the social organisation and cohesion, the environmental resilience and diversity, and the economic activities, all of which arose from this food system, have been all but lost to colonisation. But, they have not been forgotten.

 

Remembering what we have lost, inspired by the strength and resilience of our ancestors, hopeful of a better future for all people, we have begun building Yaamarra & Yarral.

 

Gamilaraay people will bring back our food systems, led by Gamilaraay people, on Gamilaraay Country. We are not interested in replicating Western ways of doing business, or in the concentration and consolidation of power, or in speaking for other communities. This work is about nation building and making our models of success (and failure) freely available for other communities to replicate and learn from. It’s about decentralisation of the food and agriculture industry and equitable First Nations involvement, particularly within the bushfood industry.

 

We want to begin acknowledging the cultural and regional diversity of our nation through the celebration of our cultural cuisine.‘Yaamarra’ is a sheaf of native grain and ‘Yarral’ is stone. Simply put, we will step into this space by taking our sheaf of native grain and use the stone to produce flour.

 

Native grain flour, from Mitchell grass that has come off Gamilaraay Country, is currently retailing for $350/kg yet Gamilaraay people are not involved in this supply chain or benefiting from this lucrative market. Will the native grain industry become the next macadamia or will we use it as an opportunity to shift the paradigm?

 

Whilst Yaamarra & Yarral is an act of self-determination, it is deliberately a space for all people to participate in this journey.

Black Duck Foods[178] (Yuin-owned native foods)

An Indigenous social enterprise committed to traditional food growing processes that care for Country and return economic benefits directly to Indigenous people. Based on Yuin Country (Mallacoota, Victoria), Black Duck Foods employs First Peoples across a range of farming activities and services to deliver native foods and knowledge to heal Country.

Nguuruu Farm (land repatriation)

Nguuruu Farm is a biodynamic farm of 220 acres on Ngunnawal land in the southern tablelands of NSW, with heritage breed Belted Galloway cattle, and rare breed Silver Grey Dorking chickens and eggs, fruits and vegetables. Murray and Michelle have fostered a relationship of respect and trust with local Ngambri, Wallabalooa and Wiradjuri man Paul Girrawah House, which has developed into an ongoing partnership conceived through the lens of Yindyamarra, a Wiradjuri term meaning respect for all things. Part of this partnership includes the repatriation of a portion of the farm (approximately 30 of their 220 acres) to Paul and his family to care for and use without interference, under the time frame they deem appropriate, with any derived revenue belonging to Paul and his family.

In turn, Murray describes how the partnership has gifted him with a very different way of relating to the land; a ‘do-no-harm-lens’ through which to slow down and connect to what he calls the ‘heartbeat of the place’. His focus now is much more oriented to what the land needs, which is ascertained by slowing right down and spending time just observing. ‘Those things, if you make time, are pretty powerful. Without Paul we were rushing around like madmen doing things, and we were missing a lot,’ Murray commented.

They are engaging in a relationalism intrinsic to much Aboriginal political ordering, a way of knowing and being where the very land is the Law, and one’s relationship to it is based on a mutualism that creates an ethical impulse to care for Country and everything on it. Embracing these ways of knowing is a critical and much-needed step in the right direction for agriculture in Australia.

Belvedere Farm (land repatriation)[179]

Belvedere Farm is on 20 acres of Jinibara Country, in the hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, run by Nick and Brydie. Belvedere run pastured cattle, pigs, and layer chickens for eggs in highly mobile systems, as well as some vegetables grown in the fertile soils left behind the livestock.

For Nick, reciprocity extends between the land and him and to its Original Custodians, and he has ‘repatriated’ an acre of land on his title to Jinibara songman BJ and his wife Libby. Nick firmly believes that non-indigenous farmers should not dictate to First Peoples how they inhabit repatriated land.

Nick observes that ‘getting right with Country’ is not a simple task for non-indigenous Australians, though he is able to clearly express the ways he listens to Country, saying:

When Jinibara people speak, Country hears them, it doesn’t hear us. I feel I benefit from being a peripheral part of their connection to Country… ‘getting right with Country’ – if you’re not decolonising, not involved in acts of solidarity… then I don’t think you can be right with Country. Decolonising yourself is such an ongoing job.

Right to Food

Context

Food Security

The Committee on World Food Security defines food security as below:

Food security means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life.[180]

Food security is commonly considered to comprise four interrelated pillars (availability, access, utilisation, and stability) – with an additional two dimensions (agency and sustainability) proposed more recently by Clapp et al. (2022).[181]

  1. Availability: The supply of food to the community and the commercial systems that provide access to that food, and considers the quantity of food, and the quality and range of foods available.
  2. Access: Having the economic and physical resources to obtain appropriate foods for a nutritious diet. Access is influenced by more than the food system alone – it also requires factors such as adequate income to be able to afford food, and private or public transport to places where food is sold or traded.
  3. Utilisation: Includes knowledge of basic nutrition and cooking skills, as well as access to clean water, sanitation, and physical infrastructure (e.g. refrigeration, storage, cooking facilities) for food preparation.
  4. Stability: Stability of availability, access, and utilisation over time, and the ability to withstand climatic disasters or seasonal events, economic disruption, and conflict.
  5. Agency: Having the agency to shape one’s own relationships with food systems and to address power imbalances within those systems, including through meaningful input into governance processes.
  6. Sustainability: Interconnection between food systems and other global systems (e.g. ecological systems). “Food system practices that contribute to long-term regeneration of natural, social, and economic systems, ensuring the food needs of the present generations are met without compromising food needs of future generations”.

The right to food is set out in Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it is also enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) Article 11, asserting that governments at all levels should continually and permanently guarantee the availability of and access to food that satisfies this right. The right to food must be maintained across the life span, and for all people irrespective of location, gender, race/ethnicity, income, etc.

Australia ratified the ICESCR in 1975.[182]

Furthermore, the right to safe (potable) and palatable water is a central consideration from both a rights-based and public health perspective, and should be understood as a key aspect of the right to food. This is emphasised in Goal 6 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: Ensure access to water and sanitation for all.[183]

Food Justice

As discussed in the Food for People Pillar of Food Sovereignty, food justice is a fundamental aspect of the Right to Food.

It represents ‘a transformation of the current food system, including but not limited to eliminating disparities and inequities’[184]. As a movement, food justice is often associated with urban alternative food networks in the US and Canadian contexts,[185] however movements such as Fair Food Futures[186] have begun localising the SDGs in Australia through food justice. It demands an acknowledgement of the racial, class, gender, ability and political inequalities historically designed into our food system.[187] 

For example, local food movements urging households to eat fresh food must account for low-income neighbourhoods who have been systematically deprived of access to healthy and sustainable food. Proponents of food security services such as food banks, which are often run by religious institutions, must consider queer or non-religious individuals who may feel uncomfortable entering those spaces. Urban farm movements must not disregard marginalised Indigenous populations within cities (as a result of colonial histories), and thus their lack of access to farms in every ‘town and city’.[188]

Food justice is a key theoretical framework to understand the intersectional nature of inequity in the food system and to explore how communities can create environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives.

Food Environments

Nutrition and its impacts on health are largely determined outside of the food and health sectors, and far beyond simple questions of food literacy and the oft-expressed ‘need to educate people’. Peoples' ability to grow, afford, store, prepare and consume nutritious food is determined by multiple factors including labour (e.g. un- or under-employed, working multiple jobs and/or long or shift hours), economic (e.g. minimum or low wages, cost of living), infrastructure (e.g. adequate housing, stable electricity supply, kitchen basics), and geography (e.g. ‘food deserts’ and ‘food swamps’, access to public transport). Thus, policies aiming to improve nutrition and health must be embedded in these other sectors.

Assistance payments during some stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g. initial JobKeeper payments) demonstrably enabled people to afford more nutritious food,[189] providing a clear evidence base for the benefits of a Universal Basic Income. Government’s subsequent reduction and cessation of these payments was a backward move that placed people back in positions of food insecurity. 

Geographic residence influences Australians’ access to fresh and nutritious foods, and exposure to unhealthy foods. Availability in urban areas (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and flooding) was relatively stable, though this can vary enormously from one suburb to another. In urban areas two (often interrelated) structural or environmental phenomena occur. First, some neighbourhoods exist in what is termed a ‘food desert.’[190] These are areas where there is limited access to nutritious and affordable food where there is a lack of grocery stores and supermarkets (and alternative distribution models) within reasonable distance of the home. Second, ‘food swamps’ [191]describe areas where there is a higher density of food outlets selling unhealthy (often fast food) compared with those selling healthy options.

Regional and remote areas have long experienced, and continue to face, substandard availability of fresh, healthy foods. The system of transporting foods long distances to these areas diminishes the range of foods available, reduces the quality of foods (e.g. fresh vegetables having already deteriorated in quality or going off too soon after purchase), and makes the cost of foods significantly higher than in urban areas.[192] 

Further, the abundance of ultra-processed foods in contemporary society severely undermines both human health and environmental wellbeing. While most foods undergo some degree of processing (e.g. canning or pickling vegetables for preservation), ultra-processed foods are those characterised by ‘formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, that results from a series of industrial processes’,[193] and whose consumption is recommended to be limited by dietary guidelines[194] in some countries (Australia’s guidelines do not yet refer to ‘ultra-processed foods’). Examples include carbonated soft drinks, confectionary, sweet or savoury packaged snacks, hot dogs, instant/ready meals, etc. Their ingredient lists are typically long, but feature no or minimal whole foods, and instead a combination of constituent substances and additives that are high in energy and nutrients linked to poor health outcomes (e.g. salt and hypertension) and low in nutrients known to be beneficial for health. Ultra-processed foods unnecessarily consume valuable environmental resources, accounting for 36-45% of total diet-related biodiversity loss, up 33% of total diet-related greenhouse gas emissions,[195] land use and food waste, and up to 25% of total diet-related water use.[196]

Food Insecurity in Australia Today

An accurate picture of food security in Australia is hampered due to inconsistent and infrequent data collection, but the prevalence of food insecurity is growing. The Foodbank Hunger Report (2021) includes a spectrum of experience from reductions in the quality, desirability and variety of diet to disruptions in food intake and eating patterns. On this basis a quarter of Australian adults (28%) can be categorised as food insecure. One in six Australians (17%) are severely food insecure, skipping meals, cutting down on the size of their meals and sometimes going a whole day without eating at least once a week, and 1.2 million children are living in food insecure households.[197]

The rate of food insecurity has increased throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.[198] Research based on lived experience and community feedback in Aboriginal communities across NSW found ‘in some rural and remote areas, local shops are pushing up their prices, and people are left with no choice but to buy cheaper (and often less healthy) options to feed their families. Increase in government payments has resulted in the one and only shop in the community providing food, jamming their prices up.’ There has been an increase in food insecurity in cities and urban areas evident[199] by an increase in demand for food relief. Australians aged 18-25 years comprise 65% of Australians experiencing food insecurity, as the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted individuals who typically work casual part-time jobs, which will have long-term repercussions on their employment and career prospects.[200] 

An ongoing state of food insecurity can result in chronic diseases in later life including diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, hypertension, obesity, nutritional deficiencies including iron deficiency anaemia and poor mental health.[201] These conditions diminish individuals’ and families’ quality of life, hamper community participation, and contribute to a burden on the health system and higher health care expenditure.[202]

Nutrition and sustainability of diets are inextricably linked. Sustainable diets are those with low or positive environmental impacts, which contribute to food and nutrition security and to a healthy life for present and future generations. Sustainable diets are protective and respectful of biodiversity and ecosystems, culturally acceptable, accessible, nutritionally adequate, safe and healthy; while respecting and benefiting farm and food system workers.[203] Notably, a sustainable diet should be healthy by definition, whereas a ‘healthy diet’, by most definitions, need not have any relationship with environmental sustainability in any of its forms.[204]

Emergency food relief cannot always provide the food to meet nutritional requirements or cultural food preferences. Food relief agencies reported insufficient quantities of vegetables (44%), quality foods (55%), foods for special dietary requirements and cultural groups (23%).[205] Emergency food relief does not meet international obligations to ensure the human right to adequate food.

Despite producing most of our food for domestic consumption and exporting over 70 percent of our agricultural produce, the vulnerability of Australia’s supply chains was laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and recent flooding events. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that extreme weather events will become more frequent and severe in Australia,[206] and this demands a more resilient food system. ‘The average storage capacity of a supermarket is only one day’s worth of fresh products’.[207] This supply chain needs a buffer and governments can no longer rely on corporations to shore up supply chains or relief agencies to provide emergency food.[208]

Food Sovereignty Demands Structural Approaches to Food Security

We assert that food production and supply and the intended social, economic and environmental outcomes should be based on a human rights framework. The ability to achieve food sovereignty requires people to have access to fresh, ethical and ecologically-sound, localised food production, distributed through short and decentralised supply chains, and full democratic participation in the food system. States including South Africa, Kenya, Switzerland, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico and Brazil have made constitutional provisions guaranteeing the right to food,[209] albeit with varying success.[210]

Brazil has a long-standing ‘food-as-a-right’ policy, and in Belo Horizonte (a city of 2.7 million people) a city agency was created to oversee systemic innovations, weaving together interests of farmers and eaters to assure that every citizen had the right to food.[211] 

Within six years, initiatives such as the Bolsa Família cash transfer scheme for low-income families, free meals in every public school, and support to small-scale family farming had reduced the number of people facing food insecurity from 50 million to 30 million. Many of the programmes implemented under Zero Hunger were pioneered in the 1990s in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte.

Presently, the failure of Australia to achieve the right to food is exemplified by:

Increased government funding and support for initiatives that improve access to and affordability of local, nutritious, culturally-appropriate, socially-just and ecologically-sound food (e.g. local growers’ markets, food procurement that prioritises local growers) have the potential to prevent or reduce the significant burden diet-related non-communicable diseases place on the Australian population and health care system. A Universal (or Unconditional) Basic Income (UBI) is one obvious way to address structural economic inequalities that lead to food insecurity. A UBI is not very widely canvassed (yet) in Australian policy debates due to the ‘common sense’ that conflates work with paid work, which is ‘specific to the western world of the last 100 years or so’.[215] We are in the midst of an evolving crisis in which the market for paid work only values certain groups of people, leaving the rest to a growing population dubbed the ‘precariat’ due to the uncertain and intermittent, often underpaid work options. A UBI is a policy response that responds to this crisis, ‘expanding the potential space for social power within the economy’.[216] UBI could accomplish three things:[217]

One can imagine, for example, that more people would be interested in being small farmers and commercial gardeners if they had a UBI to cover their basic costs of living.[218]

Issue: First Foods

Increasing the prevalence of breastfeeding (and thus reducing use of infant and toddler formula) is beneficial for the health, safety and connection of the baby and mothers, and also makes a positive contribution to environmental protection[219] by reducing the production of formula and related packaging. However, there are circumstances under which mothers are unable to breastfeed, and should have equitable and supported access to safe alternatives.

Issue: Right to water

It goes without saying that water is essential for life. Australians residing in urban areas may take their access to a reliable, safe (potable/uncontaminated) and palatable water supply for granted. However, the availability and security of the water supply in areas outside of these regions is far less certain. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are disproportionately affected by this issue. (See more under ‘First Peoples’ and ‘Land-use planning’).

Issue: Disenfranchisement of refugee and asylum seekers entering the food system

Refugee and asylum seekers entering Australia are reported to suffer complex and chronic physical and mental health conditions upon settlement.[220] As a response, community gardens for these communities have been established by local councils, private entities, civil society organisations and universities across Australia. These initiatives are key in providing these priority populations a safe space to grow crops from their homelands[221] and to strengthen their ties to the community.[222] It not only allows these communities to assert their right to nutritious and culturally-appropriate food, but centres local food systems around more biodiverse crops and sustainable and culturally-determined farming techniques.

Despite these well-documented benefits, common barriers continue to leave these food initiatives and farmers disenfranchised. The limited size of urban community gardens restricts the allocation of plot sizes,  and often leads to waiting lists of up to 6 years, as reported in a community garden in North Fitzroy, Melbourne.[223] It also results in the restriction of the diverse crops, cultivation styles, and garden aesthetics of multicultural gardeners. Further, issues with insecure land tenure, the often volunteer-basis of staffing, and insecure funding for long-term projects leads to frustration, distress and uncertainty over the gardening futures of participants.[224] Such complex barriers have often led to the closing down of gardens in some locations.[225] 

Issue: Institutional food services are failing Australia’s priority populations

Governments have few sources of leverage over increasingly globalized food systems – but public procurement is one of them. When sourcing food for schools, hospitals, and public administrations, Governments have a rare opportunity to support more nutritious diets and more sustainable food systems in one fell swoop.[226] 

The types and amounts of foods required for optimal health vary depending on life stage, gender, physical activity and other factors. First Foods have been discussed above, and growing children, adolescents, young adults and older adults all have different nutritional needs, and policies must reflect this. Similarly to First Foods, there are a number of instances whereby people have no choice or control over their right to food, particularly in institutional settings.

Schools, hospitals, aged care, hospitality prisons, relief centres and public transport hubs have control over food supply and accessibility in these environments. The dominant privatised model of procurement in these institutions has resulted in the food being largely made up of highly-processed, pre-packaged food. However, these institutions can also represent a significant opportunity to create distribution chains focused on locally sourced, sustainably produced and nutritious food. The benefits of investing in such values-based food procurement include:[227]

Institutional food service accounts for around 13 percent of Australia’s total food service market (compared with around 27 percent in the United States).[228] To look at institutional food service through the lens of food sovereignty, we need to consider the reality for our country’s priority populations in these settings.

Food in childcare and schools

Around 90 percent of school aged children bring their own packed lunch and other food items to school in Australia.[229] There are significant differences in funding and operations of private and public schools, and although many schools offer food items for purchase at canteens, it is difficult to measure how fresh and nutritious these foods are across states and territories.

Addressing the right to food for children in childcare and school up to year 12 includes considering policies that enable access to free lunches at school, which offer healthy, nutritious and diverse choices. One in two children around the world are offered a meal during school hours, such as in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Finland, Sweden and France.[230] Enabling access to free lunches does not necessarily guarantee that a child’s right to food is fully met, both because not all food provided in educational institutions is nutritious, culturally-appropriate, ethical or ecologically-sound, and because their right to food may not be met outside of school. Approximately 1.3 million children lived in severely food insecure houses in Australia in 2022,[231] as a result of the rising cost of living. Providing free meals in schools should be viewed through a food sovereignty lens, whereby children have full access to fresh, nutritious and culturally-appropriate food; that considers sensory issues such as texture for neurodivergent children; that empowers children with the knowledge to grow and prepare their own food; and that provides direct connection to local food and traditional knowledges through education.

Thus, this developmental institution has a core role in improving not only children’s access to, but utilisation of, food security, which can be achieved by explicitly teaching food literacy. Interventions to improve food literacy (or the knowledge of basic food, nutrition and cooking skills for food purchase and preparation), must must be mindful of not only health and nutrition issues, but also financial (e.g. budgeting), environmental (e.g. local, seasonal, agroecologically grown), social (e.g. farm and food worker labour), and cultural (e.g. appropriate) issues. Such interventions must also be designed around horizontal knowledge sharing. By engaging children in participatory learning experiences with excursions to local farms/community gardens and school-run agroecological gardens, farmers, community organisations, and schools can imbue in their students a self-empowerment through food literacy, as well as a desire to grow their own food whilst healing Country.

Food in hospitals and aged care

People with physical and mental health conditions should readily have access to high quality, nutritious foods in hospitals and other medical institutions.

Vitally, government, community, and private services must be considerate of the nutritional and sensory (texture, smell, taste) adequacy of meals provided for older adults through Meals on Wheels and aged care in the interests of prolonging the onset of chronic health conditions, and improving outcomes in cases where illness already exists. The Australian Government’s Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission 2022 report on food, dining and nutrition in aged care points to a study of twenty-one Victorian aged care services, which concluded that the provision of meat and dairy foods, important sources of protein, did not meet the recommended levels at that time. In addition, it also shockingly concluded that 68 percent of people in the study were malnourished or at risk of malnutrition.[232]

Food in prisons

There are approximately 43,000 people currently incarcerated in Australia, with this demographic deemed a priority population in society.[233] People who have been incarcerated often experience higher rates of homelessness, unemployment, mental health disorders, chronic physical disease, communicable disease, tobacco smoking, high-risk alcohol consumption, and illicit use of drugs than the general population.[234] Of the total number of people in prison in Australia, 30 percent are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples and 30 percent of all prison entrants have a chronic physical health condition. 

A World Health Organisation report on the impact of food health outcomes for incarcerated people, where prison food systems can exacerbate poor physical health due to weight gain, as well as affect mental health where incarcerated people feel powerless over their food choices.[235] The report compiles research on food systems within prisons across the world to measure their impact on physical and mental health of incarcerated people. There are some positive examples in Australia and other countries, where prison gardens and farms offer employment and job training to cultivate fresh fruits and vegetables, herbs and raise animals used in the preparation of meals in the prison.

In recent years, Australian media published findings from a study on the average cost of meals in aged care homes being $6.08 per day, compared with around $8.25 per day in prisons. These findings sparked moral arguments about the disparity of funding favouring prisoners over elderly people, which is both misleading and fails to recognise the notion that everyone has a right to food. In the face of moral arguments that attempt to diminish Peoples' right to food, it helps to acknowledge that a percentage of current aged care residents would have been incarcerated at some point in their life, and people currently incarcerated in Australian prisons will likely enter aged care facilities in the future.

Food in relief centres

Job loss, under or unemployment, natural disaster and domestic violence are common reasons people access food in relief centres. Foodbank and other community organisations offering food relief do incredible work to feed people in times of crises. However, well-meaning individuals and communities often donate large volumes of highly-processed, packaged goods to relief centres with the intention of ensuring there is consistent supply of foods for priority populations that are non-perishable. In times of crisis, a person’s right to food must still be upheld, including having access to fresh, diverse food sources, traditional or cultural foods, and nutrient dense fruits and vegetables. Moreover, continued focus on food relief is a short-term solution that fails to address the notion that food is considered a commodity in a capitalist food system.

Food in public transport hubs

Around 14 percent of Australians use public transport one or more times per week,[236] with trains the most popular mode of transport.

The number of Australians travelling to work on public transport has halved to just over 500,000 since the COVID-19 pandemic, largely due to an increase in working from home for service-based workers.[237] In 2021, Melbourne recorded the highest number of workers using public transport to travel to work, with those using trains, trams and buses to get to work were part of the café, restaurants and takeaway food services, or hospital industries.[238] With the exception of train stations planned in or around high streets, food options at stations are limited to vending machines offering soft drinks, processed potato chips, chocolate and other sugary, highly-processed confectionery. Considering census data from Melbourne, workers using public transport to get to and from work in low-wage industries such as hospitality are not having their right to food met in these settings.

For those driving to work or travelling interstate, airports and service stations are another example of Peoples' right to food being compromised in favour of convenience. In these settings, there are a high volume of fast food options available, with limited availability of wholefoods, including fruits, vegetables and grains. Where fresh food options are available, particularly at airports, significant price mark-ups prevent low-income and priority population demographics from having access to nutritious foods.

False Solutions

Further, the expansion of large lab-meat producers in the Global South might displace the small-scale livestock producers already operating ecologically sustainable agroecological ‘default’ livestock systems.[244] Such production raises concerns over the antidemocratic pathway towards cell-based meat.

Peoples’ Actions

What can I do?

What can my community do?

Collectivise, organise, act!

What can schools do?

What can universities do?

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

First Foods

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Food environments

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Food and water access

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Case Studies

City of Onkaparinga, SA - Enabling resilient food systems in South Australia[264]

Since 2016, various Adelaide governments, organisations and communities have been working together, guided by a diversity of interstate and local drivers, including the community vision collated in the Edible Adelaide report. In 2019, a range of needs were identified at the event: Urban food systems and the role of government. This event highlighted the need for:

  • Local, state and federal governments to prioritise food systems and develop guidelines, toolkits, budget allocation and staffing.
  • Research, to build local case studies, mapping of local food systems and food security data.
  • Prioritising collaboration and communication across governments and other sectors.

The network initially met as a working group to develop a Local Government Association Research and Development Grant, which was successful in October 2020.

A local food system is everything it takes to get food from paddock to plate. This includes how food is grown and produced, processed, packaged and distributed, marketed, sold, consumed and then disposed of.

Why is your local food system important and what can you do right where you are?

We were one of four South Australian councils who hosted an interactive workshop exploring how a healthy and sustainable food system drives climate action, supports local jobs, reduces food waste and connects us as a community.

During our workshop, we created this shared vision:

Our Community Food Vision

A healthy, sustainable food system in Onkaparinga:

  • SUPPORTS local food growing and builds skills through food education and training.
  • PROVIDES all people access to fresh, affordable food – no one left behind.
  • ACKNOWLEDGES and understands Kaurna Nation food culture and practices.
  • DIVERTS and reduces food waste from landfill.
  • ENCOURAGES a strong food economy that values our local producers.
  • DEVELOPS better food business models.

These workshops helped design a toolbox to help local governments enable local resilient food systems in the face of climate risks.

Find the toolbox here: https://www.saurbanfood.org/planners-toolbox

The City of Onkaparinga has a range of food system initiatives including:[265]

  • Magic Harvest
  • Community Gardens
  • Grow it Local
  • Social Supermarket Pilot
  • Onkaparinga Food Security Collaborative
  • Cooking program development
  • Connect
  • Verge Landscaping and Planting
  • Grow Free
  • Foodbank referral locations
  • Emergency Food Assistance list
  • Free and low cost meals list

Farm My School[266]

Farm My School is a not-for-profit organisation working to mitigate climate change while forming partnerships with teachers, students, farmers, local businesses and communities to create thriving neighbourhood hubs for learning, sharing, and connecting. Our vision is to empower students to embrace healthier lives and become future environmental stewards.

We'll be launching our pilot program and future farm at Bellarine Secondary College in Drysdale, Victoria, home to BSC Year 9 to 12 students

Ben and James planted the seeds for the Farm My School program in 2018. Their journey of working in the food industry inspired them to co-design an innovative solution to challenge the current state of the globalised food system. Ben and James’ combined experience in permaculture, education and supporting community resilience became the driving force behind Farm My School.

With the aim of developing urban farming that connects farmers with schools, the program brings local food production back into the heart of our communities. The program promotes healthy eating, ecological stewardship and connected communities. By transforming urban spaces, Farm My School utilises permaculture principles, inspiring students to care for the Earth, themselves and the people around them.

The model enables partnerships to be forged between schools and regenerative farmers, creating access to land and a gateway to careers in regenerative agriculture. The commercially-viable market garden becomes the heart of the community, providing produce to school families through the provision of weekly veggie boxes and supplying food to the school canteen

Education

Using the framework of permaculture, Farm My School uses a holistic approach to outdoor learning. This program inspires joy and innovation and empowers students to become leaders in environmental advocacy.


The farm specifically provides opportunities for:

  • Inquiry-based and cross-curricular learning, including fulfilling many
  • STEM/STEAM outcomes
  • Fostering positive student behaviour
  • Connecting students to their environment
  • Volunteering and leadership development
  • Future job skills training and community building experience for students
  • An increase in school-community collaborations leading to healthier and engaged relationships

Health and Wellbeing

  • Promoting health and wellbeing learning outcomes, including improving students’ confidence, resilience and self-esteem
  • Encouraging students, families and neighbours to introduce life-long patterns of healthy eating and food literacy

Community Engagement

  • Providing environmental stewardship and leadership opportunities for local businesses and organisations
  • Collaborating with local stakeholders to facilitate positive change
  • Supporting connection to Country
  • Improving food security
  • Supporting climate change mitigation through circular economy practices

Eagle Heights Edible Exchange

Residents of Eagle Heights, a suburb in the Gold Coast's hinterland, are tackling rising costs of living by growing their own fruit and vegetables and exchanging them with neighbours in their community.[267] This community of small backyard farmers and garden growers utilises a recycled old timber roadside stall to exchange their excess produce for another’s. For example, fresh fruits are taken from the stand to be dried or turned into jam, with the excess portion returned for other community members. By doing so the residents are able to maintain a steady supply of locally grown produce whilst minimising waste. They are also encouraged to bring seeds and recipes for exchange. Having used social media platforms to attract many Tambourine Mountain residents, the initiative has engaged 1,000 of the mountain's 7,000 residents. Not only has this edible exchange reduced the cost of living for many households, but strengthened community connections over the shared desire for affordable and nutritious food.  

Tasmania’s urban agroecological gardens

Tasmania has a widespread and well-established culture of agroecological urban gardens. One third of these gardens are located along Community Houses in low socio-economic areas, and bring communities together to protect their right to safe, nutritious, affordable, environmentally sustainable and fairly produced food. Marsh (2020) highlights four urban agroecological gardens of central consideration from a public health and food sovereignty perspective.[268] Goodwood Community Garden is maintained by and feeds its surrounding low socio-economic communities. The Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens Community Food Garden aims to grow food for low socio-economic communities and improve mental health for returned veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It also donates the majority of the 4 tonnes of local vegetables and fruit they produce to Second Bite. DIGnity Supported Community Garden supports individuals with various disabilities to garden within a shared community space. Edible Precinct serves as a reconciliation garden to honour the history and knowledge of the Palawa people as traditional custodians of Tasmania.

Cultivating Community, Melbourne

Cultivating Community has been a pioneer in Melbourne's urban agricultural community for over 20 years.[269] The co-op works with low-income and migrant communities to create equitable, secure and resilient local food systems. Through the organisation's Community Garden and Food Systems work they allow residents in Melbourne's public housing to access healthy, affordable and culturally-appropriate food. By supporting community gardens on public housing estates the initiative is able to foster an inclusive gathering space for tenants to come together and share their food cultures and traditions. Other projects such as Community Food Centres, School Food Garden programs and After School Cooking classes create opportunities for adults and children alike to connect over, share and learn how to prepare food in sustainable ways. Through this work Cultivating Community collaborates with local councils and other community groups to increase awareness of food insecurity, whilst facilitating community learning on food waste minimisation and the benefits of composting.

Food Next Door Coop

Food Next Door is an initiative which matches under-utilised farm land with landless farmers, specifically newly arrived migrants and refugee groups.[270] With community gardens based in the Sunraysia region of rural New South Wales and Victoria, the co-op aims to support small-scale regenerative farming and protect the right of migrant communities to produce nutritious and culturally-appropriate foods. For example, the hand harvesting of traditional African maize by the Twitezimbere Burundian Community in north-west Victoria has given refugees, most of whom have a farming background, an opportunity to ease into the local community whilst maintaining their cultural practices. Interviews of other migrant farmers from Vietnam, Tonga and Italy[271] have highlighted how their introduction of safe, low-tech cultivation and pest management techniques from their home countries has made community food production more resilient to pests and disease.

Other key advantages contributed by multicultural farmers include a diversity of crops and hybridisation techniques which strengthen the climate resilience of local farming ecologies. Food Next Door therefore highlights the importance of protecting these diverse farmers' right to grow nutritious culturally-appropriate food. By fostering a diverse culture of horizontal knowledge and practice sharing, these farmers and organisations are able to secure a local food system that is not only self-sufficient, but climate resilient.

Mini Farm Project, Queensland

[To be developed]

https://mfp.org.au/

Olivies to Oil Harvest Festival, CERES, Melbourne

[To be developed]

3000Acres, Melbourne

3000Acres is a social enterprise which has been supporting a range of sustainable urban agriculture projects since 2014. Their mission is to unite people who want to grow food on empty, under-utilised land around Melbourne. They work with councils, developers, statutory bodies and communities to support skill and knowledge building. They also work to transform underutilised land – such as tiny verges on street corners, vacant car parks and large empty lots waiting for development – into community gardening spaces. Their services include providing free advice to individuals and groups looking to start community gardens or community compost initiatives; offering expertise to councils, developers and other organisations on urban agriculture and sustainability projects; facilitating food swaps, workshops and their flagship Olives to Oil Harvest Festival.

Community Grocer, Melbourne

The Community Grocer is a not-for-profit social enterprise aiming to create healthy connected communities and increase physical, economic and social access to fresh food. Based in the Melbourne suburbs of Fitzroy, Pakenham and Carlton, Community Grocer hosts markets in priority populations, stocking culturally-appropriate produce (reaching up to 61 types of fruits and vegetables) and creating weekly gatherings to celebrate diversity. They also offer fruit and vegie boxes to be purchased one-off or through subscription. Their combined 200 eaters every week represent 17 different nationalities.[272] 1 in 6 of these eaters are food insecure and 25% are low income.[273] As such, ensuring affordability is key – the Grocer offers food prices which are 24-30% cheaper than supermarkets. They represent an important actor in the food network promoting food justice and protecting the community’s right to food in a dignified and culturally-celebratory way.

Chile’s integrative food labelling and marketing policies

Chile’s introduction of the Law of Food Labelling and Advertising in 2012 was exemplary of a structural government approach to human health, in particular the country’s obesity and non-communicable disease epidemics.[274] The policy includes front of package labelling for foods and beverages that exceed set thresholds for sugar, sodium or saturated fat. This has had a strong effect on reducing the consumption of UPFs and has led other countries (such as Israel, Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Uruguay) to adopt similar labels.[275] The law also banned the sale, promotion and free distribution of all foods with warning labels in schools. In 2016 Chile restricted child-directed marketing which used popular children’s characters on the packaging of products high in energy, saturated fats, sodium and sugars. The country also restricted child-directed television marketing, and subsequently all marketing of warning-labelled foods, from 6pm to 10pm.[276] These laws have been key in improving point of purchase consumer information on the quality of food, and decreasing children’s exposure to the marketing, advertising and sales of unhealthy food. Whilst these laws have been contested by the private sector, they have proved an important global example of a government protecting the Peoples' right to food through enforcing healthy and democratic healthy food environments.  

Belo Horizonte, Brazil

The Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte’s food security framework has redefined national and international standards for governing the right to food. Since founding the Municipal Secretariat of Supply and its 20 interconnected programs in 1993, the city has been a pioneer in promoting food sovereignty. The Social Security Food Service mandates fresh-cooked, low-price meals available for urban workers; meals for workers’ children; minimum wages to increase the demand and food security of industrial labourers; and nutrition training courses aimed at increasing the population's food literacy.[277] The national Fome Zero programs sought to systematically support local production and purchasing by requiring school food programs and restaurants to offer significant amounts of local vegetables and fruits each day. This strategy - along with other trade policies to eliminate dumping on their markets - has supported the livelihoods of small-scale agricultural holdings whilst improving the health and food security of rural and urban populations alike.

The result of this institutional prioritisation of food sovereignty, human dignity and wellbeing has led to unprecedented improvements in food security: between 1987-1997 infant mortality has fallen by more than 70%, hospitalisations due to diabetes have fallen by 33%, and the per capita household consumption of fruits and vegetables has increased by 25%.[278] 

The cost? Strong political will and 2% of the city’s annual budget.[279] 

For other examples of sustainable public procurement policy see.[280] 

  • Towards a Healthy, Regenerative and Equitable Food System in Victoria: A Consensus Statement[281] - VicHealth and the Food Systems and Food Security Working Group[282]
  • Vermont’s (USA) Farm to Plate Policy (2021-2030)[283]
  • Michigan (USA) Farm to Institute Network[284]
  • Denmark’s Organic Public Procurement model[285]
  • Finland’s Food 2030 Policy[286]

Land and water use (Planning Law)

Context

We recognise the impact of colonisation on First Peoples, and the colonial histories that dispossessed them, which continue to this day. We know that the role of farmers in the settler-colonial invasion has a direct and ongoing impact on that dispossession, as settler-colonialism is a ‘structure’ and ‘not an event’.[287] 

Where farmers continue to farm on unceded Land, and benefit from ongoing colonialism, we must reckon with how this positions us:

When reckoning with our position, we fully engage with fundamental issues of justice in this country and for Country.

We aim to increase understanding of land as not simply a place to live and farm, but knowing the land as a ‘nourishing terrain’,[288] a place where a person belongs, where Indigenous Peoples share kin, and in which mutual responsibilities to care for the land are grounded. This fundamentally changes responsibilities and obligations to Country, and is integral to the food sovereignty movement. Land access and secure tenure remain key barriers to respecting First Peoples’ right to self-determination, and to growing the movement of small-scale farmers towards a much-needed agroecological transition.

In this section, we consider land and water use policy together, where planning and agricultural policies and legislation factor into both farming and water management. However, a separate section on water follows, addressing systemic issues such as extracting water by corporations as a commodity in bottles; the impact of industrial fishing on marine ecosystems; and the notion of blue economy vs. blue justice.

Although farming on land with the use of water, as well as in waters, presents a unique set of challenges, current government policy largely fails to recognise how the two intersect as part of ecosystems. For example, water is often considered as a resource needed to produce yields for the provision of food and fibre (the majority for export), and policy aims to monitor resource supply to ensure farmers can sustain or increase yields for trade. Instead, policy should consider how agriculture impacts the quality and supply of water as a vital part of life on earth. More critically, governments must recognise the cultural and spiritual significance of water for First Peoples, where Country is kin, and establish policies that enable First Peoples’ communities to manage land and waters.

This chapter also analyses the importance of government regulation which recognises the vast differences between intensive livestock production and pastured livestock. Such a distinction is critical in supporting small-scale pastured pig and poultry farms and their ability to produce in ecologically-sound ways which maintain their responsibilities to care for Country. In addition there are large areas of semi-arid extensive grazing lands, rangelands,[289] across Australia that would benefit from an agroecological focus in their management with an added benefit of helping  to revitalise rural communities.

Agroecology is a science, practice and movement that incorporates Indigenous knowledge systems with ecological principles to enable ecologically-sound and equitable food systems (see Agroecology). This concept underpins recommendations for land and water policy in response to the consequences of the ongoing loss of small-scale farmers and need to support them for their critical work in combating climate change, protecting and promoting biodiversity and social justice, and respecting First Peoples’ sovereignty.

Issue: Farming on Aboriginal Country

Country in Aboriginal English is not only a common noun but also a proper noun. People talk about Country in the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to Country, sing to Country, visit Country, worry about Country, feel sorry for country, and long for Country. People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy. Country is not a generalised or undifferentiated type of place, such as one might indicate with terms like ‘spending a day in the country’ or ‘going up the country’. Rather, country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. Because of this richness, Country is home, and peace; nourishment for body, mind and spirit; heart’s ease. [290]

The British settler-colonial invasion brought the idea of private land ownership to what is now known as Australia. Where privately held agricultural land exists, there is an assumed a priori right of the private land owner to productively use it and derive benefit from it for farming. However, this right was and remains superimposed on Country.

Private land ownership in Australia is not subject to the obligations set out under the Nagoya Protocol, which assure First Peoples’ free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) for use of their genetic resources, and a requirement to share benefits accrued from use. We assert that landowners have a moral obligation to seek consent for commercial use of indigenous foods and to share any benefits derived from their sustainable use. For those committed to going further in respecting First Peoples’ sovereignty on Country, repatriation of or collaboration on land, paying the rent and allocating a portion of income to Traditional Custodians is encouraged, as are (see more: Peoples’ Actions).

Understanding what it means to be farming on Country requires empathic engagement with the truth of First Peoples being dispossessed of something inextricably linked to their being. Without Treaty and while Aboriginal Lands remain unceded, we cannot claim that settler possession is legitimate possession. While we address farmers in particular due to their special dependency on and attachment to the land, all non-indigenous peoples in Australia need to reckon with and should make strides to make reparations for our illegitimate possession of Aboriginal Land.

First Peoples have long articulated the need to be back on Country and to heal Country. The Uluru Statement from the Heart outlined the pathway for First Peoples in Australia to achieve ‘rightful place’ through Voice, Treaty and Truth-telling. It instructs AFSA as a farmer-led organisation to attend to a more truthful accounting of Australia’s history, with its violence on the frontier, and ancient and ongoing stories of First Peoples’ connection to Country.  

The complex unravelling of relations of power and privilege require those who farm on unceded land to explore healing processes. First Peoples’ lack of access to Country reflects an ongoing dispossession, and tangibly affects the ability of First Peoples to connect with and practise culture on Country. Actions by farmers to provide access and tenure on private landholdings will not displace settler-descendants, but rather can forge new relationships and partnerships while reflecting the truth of our position on this Country.

First Peoples have been fighting for land justice since colonisation, where settler-colonial systems and policy has contributed to the erosion of First Peoples’ rights and the health of Country health. Native Title legislation, and subsequent state and local government initiatives have failed to centre First Peoples’ relationship to land in management plans.

Land-dependent cultural values include:[291] 

Issue: Land access and secure tenure

In 2021, Farmer Incubator conducted research into the opportunities and challenges facing young and new farmers in Australia, including First Peoples, and found the primary barriers include:

Policies that enable gentrification of agricultural land and ownership of large and multiple properties are contributing to the increasing inaccessibility of land in Australia. While landsharing examples are on the rise (see AFSA’s Farming On Other Peoples’ Land (FOOPL) program, Farmer Incubator, and others), many do not offer long-term secure tenure for a variety of reasons, including restrictive planning controls. Additionally, land-use legislation typically prohibits more than one dwelling on agricultural land that might support multiple farming households on a single property. This is in contradiction to local government decisions that too frequently allow sub-division of viable agricultural land for ‘lifestyle’ blocks, taking land out of farming as per the first point.

Issue: Protecting agricultural land

Loss of agricultural land through changes in zoning, inappropriate development and resource extraction, carbon and biodiversity ‘farming’ and renewable energy production that take land out of production, as well as loss of soil and water through damaging practices, export, and waste, will have permanent and irreversible negative impacts on the ability of Australia to produce and supply food to its citizens now and in the future. And with approximately 17.3 million people living in our eight capital cities, the issue of food production and protection of agricultural land adjacent to these areas has never been more important.

The pressures of a growing population must be dealt with in the residential suite of zones, not in zones intended to support food production (e.g. Farming Zone, Primary Production, Rural Landscape, and Primary Production in Small Lots zones, to name a few from Victoria and NSW). This is especially critical in the face of the negative impacts of climate change on Australia’s capacity to grow food on the limited arable land available, most of which is concentrated around cities. If governments continue to allow inappropriate development and urban growth onto viable farm land, future generations will become food insecure. A food secure and food sovereign future depends on appropriate planning controls that preserve farmland in perpetuity.[293]

Local governments should prioritise keeping agricultural land in agroecological production, through rates rebates for primary production and innovations such as the ‘open spaces tax’ in Boulder, Colorado, or the French SAFER model (see case studies below).

Issue: Urban and peri-urban food production

Melbourne’s Foodbowl produces 41 percent of its food, but if allowed to continue unchecked, issues with urban sprawl could see this figure down to 18 percent by 2030.[294] In Sydney, whose surrounding agricultural areas produce only half what Melbourne’s do for its urban population, approximately 60 percent of total food production will be lost by 2031 if peri-urban development is allowed unchecked. Vegetables, meat and eggs will be hardest hit: 92 percent of Sydney’s current fresh vegetable production could be lost, 91 percent of meat and 89 percent of eggs.[295] Other capital cities in Australia are facing similar pressures.

In addition to the loss of peri-urban food production, policy which prohibits urban food production inhibits food sovereignty, and therefore also food security. In Australia, policy barriers to urban agriculture relate to state planning schemes, where strategic land-use plans and land-use controls are the two main tools applied to food production.[296] Under planning schemes and policy, some examples that prohibit urban food production include:

More broadly, there appear to be two main reasons why planning fails to account for urban and peri-urban food production in Australia.[297] Firstly, government policy geared towards industrial-scale agriculture is not suitable for cities and peri-urban areas. Planning schemes and land-use controls make this clear where strict rules for buffer zones and other industrial farming impact nearby residents. Secondly, the global food system’s reliance on agricultural imports and exports has led to food systems and design being left out of planning approaches altogether. In Australia, traditional urban planning approaches account for all basic human rights – clean air, water and shelter – except food, which is widely accepted by planners as a rural interest.

Issue: Scale-appropriate planning controls

AFSA consistently calls for scale-appropriate measures that acknowledge the risks of large-scale industrial agriculture with their long and complex supply chains, and in turn we seek to minimise the burden on smallholders and independent food producers. The recommendations below apply to various components of our food system, where regulatory burdens are most felt by AFSA’s members and allies.

Pastured livestock

The differences between intensive livestock production and raising animals on pasture are vast, from the philosophies that drive the different models to their consequences for animals, ecosystems, and farmer and eater health and wellbeing. However, state planning provisions typically fail to reflect these profound differences.

As one illustration, in the case of pastured pig farming, per the Victorian Planning Provisions (VPP) prior to 2018, Intensive Animal Husbandry referred to ‘importing most food from outside the enclosures’. AFSA advocated strongly against this planning definition of ‘Intensive Animal Husbandry’, which was clearly inadequate and caused significant material and symbolic damage to Victoria’s pastured livestock farming community. The fact that the same definition was applied to an 8-sow pastured pig farm and a 1000-sow indoor piggery was a stark example of this inadequacy, and similar broad and damaging definitions still exist in other states in Australia. Similarly, local councils in NSW also historically defined pig farms as ‘intensive agriculture’ in their local environment plans (LEP), on the basis that the majority of the pig feed was sourced off farm. This required all pig farming enterprises to submit a development application for a permit to farm, whether they operated an indoor or free range system, and whether they raised less than 10 sows or as many as 1000 sows.  

Sustained lobbying from AFSA and our allies led to positive reforms in Victoria in 2018 and NSW in 2022, and a less burdensome definition can be seen in both states.[298] While in Victoria, ‘low-density mobile outdoor pig and poultry’ guidelines were developed in close consultation with AFSA, reducing the burden on smallholders, the NSW reform went further, and allows poultry farms with less than 1000 birds (as long as they are not within 1km of another poultry farm) and pig farms with less than 20 breeding sows or less than 200 pigs (as long as they are not within 2km of another pig farm) to be developed without consent. We support these reforms as a key step by governments towards supporting more diversified and resilient production systems while minimising the burden on smallholder poultry and pig producers. Another such positive example is Tasmania, which has no regulatory burdens for their small poultry producers.

At the heart of planning controls for animal industries is the perceived or actual conflict between residential and agricultural land use. The zones that support agriculture (e.g. Farming, Rural, etc) must maintain a key focus on preserving land for agricultural use, especially as the pressures of development for non-agricultural uses are being felt in peri-urban areas that have not been responsibly managed to date, and have forced farming further and further from Melbourne and regional cities (see ‘protecting agricultural land’ above).

In the case of pastured pig and poultry farms, they should be wholly unshackled from the well-documented environmental consequences[299] of their industrial counterparts and treated independently, because they do not pose a significant risk to environment or amenity. We would recommend that governments consult with shires with rapidly growing populations of pastured pig and poultry farms, such as Hepburn Shire in Victoria and Warwick Shire in southern Queensland, who share our concerns about the overly onerous requirements of most current state schemes for small-scale producers.

Horticulture 

While small-scale market gardens in Australia have historically fed their communities without overly burdensome planning restrictions, they face increasing pressures of urban sprawl and loss of peri-urban farmland, where many of these farms have long been located. For example, Foodprint Melbourne found that by 2050, up to 77 percent of farmland in the city's inner foodbowl could be lost if current urban density trends are maintained[300]. Other studies found that Western Sydney - the historical foodbowl of Sydney producing more than three-quarters of total agricultural produce in the metropolitan region - may have lost as much as 60 percent of its agricultural land over the past ten years.[301]

Another key issue facing existing and especially new horticulture producers is access to water and water allocations. The high cost of drilling a bore can be an insurmountable barrier in itself, and scale-blind water licence fees add another, not to mention ongoing purchase of annual allocations. Like the problems with pastured versus intensive livestock production, the difference between a 1-acre market garden, 100 acres of almond trees, and 1000 acres of rice in terms of water use is huge, but not well accounted for in water policy.

New standards for berries, leafy greens, and melons approved by FSANZ in late 2022 are another example of scale-inappropriate regulation, where food-borne illnesses arising from industrial monocultures (including imported berries) are the justification to increase regulatory burden regardless of scale or length of supply chain. AFSA is working with several states in the early stages of working through implementation to try to minimise the impact of small-scale market gardens selling directly.

Rural Industry

The regulatory requirements and costs for small-scale value chain facilities are overly burdensome in relation to the risks they present, which are significantly lower than those posed by large-scale facilities. This applies especially around planning provisions to protect environment and amenity.

Abattoirs

A 2020 report from a Parliamentary Inquiry on animal welfare in the UK[302] outlined the challenges farmers face without access to local processing facilities and the extensive benefits to small-scale farmers, animal welfare, and environmental outcomes from supporting the development of small-scale abattoirs. The issues and benefits are also highly applicable to the Australian context. One recommendation of particular note addressed planning issues in this way:

2.43 Government should consider low capacity abattoirs processing under 1,000 LSUs and running alongside other farming and processing activities being deemed agricultural buildings with respect to business rates and building control, subject of course to planning conditions necessary for local community protection.

The Canadian province of British Columbia has also recently proposed legislation[303] to ease the burden on small-scale livestock producers who slaughter small numbers of animals on farm for sale off farm, an initiative we are interested in discussing further.

In Victoria, in the Farming Zone, ‘rural industry’ is an acceptable use, however it excludes abattoirs and sawmills. We propose a very simple change to the legislation to enable small-scale on-farm abattoirs with a small throughput of animals.[304]

We propose that a mix of small-scale local and on-farm abattoirs present an important opportunity to support small-scale, artisanal producers and regional economies through local processing and value adding. A return to far more abattoirs that service small-scale farms in a small radius (1-100km) would dramatically increase the resilience of local economies in the face of climate change and future pandemics, as well as in the seemingly inevitable continued loss of medium-scale regional abattoirs to their large-scale industrial counterparts.

Abattoirs owned and operated by farmers and their communities can escape the profit imperative of corporate models, and instead direct funds into regional jobs and community development, with the potential for a renaissance of associated industries (e.g. tanning, leatherworks, soap-making, more value adding of meat products, and of course local meat for households, local providores and restaurants).

The global food sovereignty movement has advocated for legislative, policy, and financial support for local value chain infrastructure for decades, and the FAO has at least a decade of advocating for connecting smallholders to value chains.[305] Our long-expressed concerns at the vulnerabilities of long, highly-centralised supply chains were repeatedly manifested over the series of COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. There really is no time like the present to show support for local food economies.

Farm Gate Shops

Farm gate sales help farmers realise the full value of their produce, and support local communities’ access to locally grown produce, thereby reducing waste, GHG emissions, and often food safety risks due to the decreased cold chain infrastructure and handling requirements of direct supply chains. And yet in many zones, farms face a plethora of planning controls that either prohibit or make difficult and expensive what should be a relatively simple development to install a farm gate sales outlet.[306] Like other areas of rural industry, barriers to localised food production, processing and distribution should be reformed and where possible, removed.

False Solutions

Peoples’ Actions

What can I do?

What can my community do?

Collectivise, organise, act!

What can schools do?

What can universities do?

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations

First Peoples

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Land and water access, tenure, and custodianship

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Protection of agricultural land

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Rural Industry

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Below is a guide on current planning legislation governing abattoirs under rural industry (or equivalent) across each state and territory, with proposed reforms worth considering to support the scaling out of small-scale farms and localised food systems.

[The following table includes draft proposals for planning reform, with an example given for Victoria. Consultation will call on farmer members to offer input on where planning reform should be focused across different states and territories.]

VIC

Current legislation:

35.07           FARMING ZONE

35.07-1   Section 1: Table of uses

Permit not required

 ‘Rural industry (other than Abattoir and Sawmill)’

Proposed reform:

35.07           FARMING ZONE

35.07-1   Section 1: Table of uses

Permit not required

‘Rural industry (other than Abattoir processing more than 1000 livestock units (LSU) per annum, and Sawmill milling timber exogenous to the property)’

NSW

QLD

SA

WA

TAS

NT

 

Pastured livestock land use

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Protection of biodiversity

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Protection of water catchments

As discussed further in the Water section of this Peoples’ Food Plan, water should be recognised as a living part of our natural environment, particularly for First Peoples where water is an intrinsic part of identity for Traditional Custodians.

State Governments:

Protect water catchments in the context of agriculture:

The Federal Government:

Protect water catchments in the context of agriculture:

Case Studies

Food Resilient Neighbourhood Project (Brisbane)

In Brisbane, the Food Resilient Neighbourhood Project[323] aims to empower the community to grow healthy locally-grown food in public spaces that is not reliant on big corporations. Led by local government, the Project started in response to food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic, with one of the first projects  being a collective of 3 seedling hubs in the inner city suburbs of West End and Highgate Hill. The seedling hubs are a space where local communities can swap locally-germinated seedlings and seeds without having to go through large-scale commercial plant suppliers.

Germinating and swapping heirloom plant varieties helps preserve genetic diversity and prevents the homogenisation and monopolisation of seed stock by big companies that patent seed species for profit. Seedling hubs provide a perfect tool for networking with our neighbours and also fostering a connection to plants and growing our own food, which effectively creates more resilient and self-sustaining communities.

Further to this, Brisbane City Council allows local residents to plant verge gardens to grow food, on the condition that they do not block pedestrian paths or parked cars, and do not interfere with underground pipelines. The purpose of verge gardening is to enable communities to grow their own food to increase equitable access to fresh produce, as well as reclaim or repurpose public space.

The Project also enabled three new community-led urban farming projects to be established by a group of local gardening activists, with the support of Councillor Jonathan Sri’s office. The gardeners work collectively under the umbrella of Growing Forward Brisbane (Meanjin),[324] a social movement which is about trying to reclaim government land that has been misused or abandoned. The collective has engaged a lot of local residents in learning about growing food, learning about community and learning about how to be more resilient in the face of pandemics and climate induced natural disasters.

Agrarian Trusts: An open opportunity for land justice in Australia

Farmland and community land trusts can be used to preserve agricultural land into the future, preventing development for other purposes that might threaten community and national food security and local food sovereignty. A farmland trust is a ‘private, non-profit organisation that preserves farms’ and arable land. Farmland trusts are registered legal entities, which may or may not have charitable status, depending on the jurisdiction in which they are incorporated. They also vary in scale, with some operating at local level, others regionally or nationally. Typically the ownership structure of smaller-scale farmland trusts provides for a wide degree of community participation.

There are many well-developed and successful models of such trusts in North America and the United Kingdom, which provide examples for Australia, such as the Vancouver Agricultural Land Reserve, the Fordhall Farm, the American Farmland Trust, the Agrarian Trust, and the Kindling Trust. A thorough review of farmland trusts operating in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom was published in 2010 by the Land Conservancy of British Columbia and Farm Folk City Folk, and another covering North America was published by the American Farmland Trust.[325]

Open Spaces Sales Tax (Boulder, Colorado, USA)

An Open Spaces Sales Tax[326] was introduced in Boulder County (Colorado, USA) through which residents have approved various sales taxes to support the preservation of open space purchases, the management and conservation of native habitats, and support of recreational opportunities. The Open Space Sales Tax is a sales tax of 0.25% (25¢ on a $100 purchase).

To date, approved tax measures by residents include:

  • 1993: 0.25% sales tax through 2009
  • 1999: Extension of 0.25% sales tax through 2019
  • 2004: 0.1% sales tax, of which 0.05% is perpetual and 0.05% is through 2024
  • 2008: extension of existing 0.1% tax through 2029
  • 2010: 0.15% sales tax through 2030
  • 2016: extension of 0.125% sales tax (half of 0.25%) through 2034

Money raised by these sales taxes supports acquisition of open space by allowing the county to purchase new properties as well as pay off bonds that enabled earlier open space purchases. The funds also pay for land used for sustainable agriculture, and programs that help preserve habitat, provide educational and recreational programs and create and maintain trails.

SAFER – Agricultural Land Protection – France[327]

SAFER (Société d’Aménagement Foncier et d’Etablissement Rural) means the "land development and rural establishment society.” It was created after pressure from the young farmer's union CNJA (now JA – Jeunes Agriculteurs) and is a series of 27 regional not for profit organisations mandated for public mission that were set up in the 1960’s across France. It regulates the buying and selling of farmland.

To ensure that agricultural land stays affordable for farmers, and continues to be farmed, rather than having rich families or corporations buying up all the land as speculation, SAFER’s role is to monitor farm land sales, purchase and manage agricultural land, forests and rural property with a goal of facilitating young farmers and start-ups access to land, protecting landscapes and natural resources and supporting the development of local communes and their economies.

When land is offered for sale in France, including empty plots, period properties, vineyards, property in rural areas that include farm buildings it must be notified. SAFER then has the ability to either amicably or pre-emptively purchase it to resell or lease it to local farmers or public organisations to:

  • Promote agriculture and forestry
  • Encourage young farmers to set up
  • Protect the environment, landscapes and natural resources
  • Develop local economies

SAFER may acquire properties for the sole purpose of keeping them for agricultural use, now or in the future. Unlike a private seller who will sell to the highest bidder, SAFER will look to sell to the best bidder in terms of their intended use of the land. SAFER also works with Community Farmland Trusts to make farmland available to tenants.

SAFER finds candidates through public announcements and on its own property site (www.proprietes-rurales.com). It also draws on local knowledge of who may take it on. SAFER chooses the best candidate to sell to after applications are studied by the technical committee and issues guidelines for the buyer to follow for at least 10 years (linked to the motives for why the buyer was chosen).

Properties are sold to whoever is judged to have a project in the best public interest. ‘Buyers could include a farmer or wine maker, a mairie, or a body such as a national park authority or coastal protection body, the Conservatoire du Littoral.’1[328]


Water 

Context

Historically, water has been held in the soil and landscape. This continues to decrease over time due to the introduction of colonial agriculture systems, including sheep, cattle, monocultures of annual crops (many ill suited to a water scarce continent), and a disregard for First Peoples’ land management practices.

Water is precious like a sacred site; we need to be consulted and asked. Our ancestors have been here forever and still are. Working together, better communication.

Community members from Yeperenye in Northern Territory.[329]

Water must be viewed as a vital part of sustaining all life, from soils and crops, to animals and human beings. For over 65,000 years First Peoples have adopted this way of thinking and interacting with water as kin, not as a commodity. In Western Australia, there is critical work being done by the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council, an Indigenous-led organisation guided by a diverse representation of senior elders with cultural authority, knowledge holders on the front line, defending against the destruction of cultural heritage, ecological damage, poverty and climate change.[330] 

It is the Council’s aim to ensure that the Martuwarra Fitzroy River has its rights to live and flow protected as a living ancestor. First Peoples’ knowledge in caring for Country extends to water as kin, where songlines and traditional knowledges are passed down by generations to understand the Original Custodians’ connection to River, where she came from and where she is going.

The Council also aims to engage in a consultative process with government and other stakeholders to ensure co-design includes co-decision making on water planning and adaptive management to fully understand the cumulative social, cultural and environmental impacts of water allocation plans across the Catchment. It is this blend of Indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge that supports agroecological approaches to sustainable water management and water justice.

Natural sequence farming, developed by Peter Andrews OAM, is based on the principle of reintroducing natural landscape patterns and processes as they would have existed in Australia prior to European settlement. This has included:​

There is an imbalance towards water access licences for export crops, fodder and fibre, which needs to be rebalanced to ensure greater prioritisation for nutritious and culturally-appropriate food sold domestically to nourish Australian communities, in addition to maintenance of the health of environmental and cultural flows. Grassroots initiatives such as the Mildura Community Water Bank (MCWB, see case study below)[332] should be promoted and subsidised to ensure equitable access for small-scale agriculture, especially that of priority populations such as refugees and migrant communities.

Nature is not capital and should not be dematerialised and traded on open markets - the current model of trading water access licences on the Murray Darling Basin negatively impacts First Peoples and cultural outcomes, the environment and small-scale food producers. The Murray Darling Basin’s capacity to provide water to all its communities is at risk. While the process of formulating the MDBP was long and fraught with governance issues, the four affected states (QLD, NSW, VIC and SA) agreed to implement it in 2012 for the health of the river and its many and diverse communities and uses. However, it appears that lobbying from industrial agriculture – in particular the cotton industry, which by its own admission uses a staggering 26% of all Australian agricultural irrigation water[333] and then exports 99 percent of their product – resulted in a proposed amendment to take 70GL out of the system further upstream instead of retaining this resource downstream as environmental flows. Withdrawing more water upstream against community sentiment is deeply flawed and a rejection of the tenets of water sovereignty because it’s allowing a few large farms to quite literally ship our scarce water resources overseas for profit.

The Great Artesian Basin (the Basin) is one of the largest underground freshwater resources in the world. It underlies approximately 22 percent of Australia an area of over 1.7 million square kilometres beneath arid and semi-arid parts of Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and the Northern Territory. Whilst also subject to major water extraction from pastoral, mining and domestic uses, the Basin is an example where issues have been identified and are being addressed through a collaborative approach of state and federal governments and stakeholders via the Strategic Management Plan.[334] Over the last few decades practical changes to water management and transparency through the capping of bores, measurement of take, water pressure and both community and school education have seen improvements in the health of this important resource. Today there is greater recognition of the Basin as a highly valued water source which provides diverse benefits and opportunities. Basin springs have enabled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to occupy dry inland areas of Australia for more than 40,000 years, and communities maintain cultural, social and spiritual connections with Basin springs and their associated ecological communities and landscapes.The provision of drinking water through domestic bores and town water supply has been essential to the development of regions within the Basin and is used in more than 120 towns and settlements.

 

Demographic growth and economic development are putting unprecedented pressure on renewable, but not infinite water sources. This is especially so in relatively arid regions such as in the southeast of Australia. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 800 million people are expected to be living in countries or regions with ‘absolute’ water scarcity (<500 m3 per year per capita), and two-thirds of the world population could be under ‘stress’ conditions (between 500 and 1000 m3 per year per capita) by 2025.[335] Recognising the growing challenge of water scarcity, the UN General Assembly launched the Water Action Decade[336] on 22 March 2018 to mobilise action that will help transform how we manage water.

Governments are compelled to ensure that water governance addresses issues of access, rights and tenure from the perspective of sustainability, inclusiveness, and efficiency. The FAO notes that:

to a significant extent, the over abstraction of ground water reflects the incentives that users face resulting from both market and policy failures. The available enabling frameworks and guiding principles are in insufficient use and there is a paucity of responsible collective action. This is one of the root causes of groundwater depletion and degradation of aquifers, and urgent call to action is needed if trends in the state of this resource are to be reversed.[337]

In response to these pressing concerns and known causes, the FAO’s Shared Global Vision for Groundwater Governance[338] formulated an agreement between governments of the world that by 2030:

A note on Aquaecology: A food sovereignty framework for socially-just, sustainable seas?

Despite the increase of complex social and ecological issues emerging from the current use, extraction and governance of water and aquaculture, the global food sovereignty movement largely promotes agroecology in relation to smallholders' struggles in the face of land-based resource grabs by industrial agriculture and other extractive industries such as mining.[339]

Although agroecology incorporates water into holistic farm management systems, water is usually considered in terms of how it is used on land, such as to water crops to grow food. In Australia and globally, agroecology does not adequately cover the deeply troubling issues of industrial fishing, nor the struggles of small-scale fishers. Hence, aquaecology can be applied as a food sovereignty framework that supports localised food systems inclusive of fish and other seafood, as well as small-scale fishers.

Aquaecology is a natural approach to fisheries, based on species-specific equipment and techniques, following life-cycle and breeding patterns, protecting coastal ecosystems, and adhering closely to catch limitations. Sharing with the agroecological approach to farming a politically mobilising frame focused on the empowerment and agency of those directly engaged in the practice, aquaecology promotes an alternative to the mitigation and adaptation strategies used by most governments worldwide, which allow control over resources to be redirected away from communities and into the hands of state and private actors.”[340]

Until now, AFSA has not made specific reference to aquaecology in its engagement with government, farmers and allies in the food sovereignty movement. However, through presenting the key issues of water governance and industry, our aim is to work collectively and collaboratively towards incorporating aquaecology in food sovereign approaches to water justice for First Peoples and sustainable, socially-just aquaculture led by small-scale fishers.

The following key issues highlight the need for peoples’ actions to embrace aquaecology as a food sovereignty framework.

Issue: Right to water

It goes without saying that water is essential for life. Australians residing in urban areas may take their access to a reliable, safe (potable/uncontaminated) and palatable water supply for granted. However, the availability and security of the water supply in areas outside of these regions is far less certain. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are disproportionately affected by this issue. (See more under ‘First Peoples’, ‘Right to Food’ and ‘Land-use planning’). The subsequent issues under this section outline the core structural impediments to having Right to Water recognised by governments. Ultimately, we reject the commodification and extraction of water by corporations and instead call for water management that is co-designed and co-managed by First Peoples, small-scale farmers and local communities.

Issue: Australia exports the majority of food produced for the profit of some at the expense of water for all

We need a return to the fundamental principles of water security and sovereignty. All peoples have a right to clean, safe water. Water should be distributed and used equally and on a sustainable basis. Water should not be privatised, commodified, and sold back to people - because we all need water to survive, it is a public good. As with agroecology and regenerative agriculture, which seek to leave the farm within and sustain healthy ecosystems, we must do more than merely sustain sickly river systems. We must regenerate them to ensure we have a future where everyone has access to clean, safe, nourishing food and water.

Instead, Australia exports up to 72 percent of the food and fibre produced here, in particular of some of the thirstiest commodities such as cotton, dairy, rice and almonds. These systems not only degrade land and water systems, they essentially export the public goods that are soil and water in the form of commodities, putting profits before the health and well being of peoples and Country.

Irrigated water use on Australian farms 2020-21

Crop/pasture

Volume of water used (megalitres)

Exported (%)

Pastures and cereals (grazing)

1.4 million ML

N/A

Cotton

1.3 million ML

99.9%[341]

Fruit and nuts

1.1 million ML

33%

Sugar cane

795,400 ML

84%

Pastures and cereals cut for hay and silage

664,700 ML

N/A

Rice

540,000 ML

92%

Grapevines

516,500 ML

70%[342] (table grapes)

60% wine[343]

Vegetables

382,000 ML

8%[344]

Issue: Climate change poses a threat to inland water

The 2022 State of the Environment report flags climate change as a serious threat to inland water supply as Australia faces increasingly dry conditions and prolonged drought.[345] The report states that water use, particularly from irrigation, is a major pressure on Australia’s water supply and will continue to be constrained under a changing climate. Industrial-scale farming uses a significant portion of Australia’s total water supply, where in 2020-21, 73 percent of water was applied to crops in the production of food and fibres.[346] 

AFSA notes two major issues with water managed under current government policy:

  1. Concurrent policies that support industrial-scale agriculture and increased productivity will only continue to put strain on inland water resources with or without a management plan; and
  2. No existing government policy effectively recognises First Peoples as the rightful custodians of water, to manage and protect water.

Issue: Water justice for First Peoples

Water justice is an inherently political issue in the settler-colonial context of Australia. On one hand, it is common knowledge that water is vital for sustaining all life on earth, from growing the food we eat, to having access to clean drinking water which is deemed a universal human right. However, settler-colonial systems have come to view water as a resource, where under capitalism access to clean water varies depending on wealth, class, gender and race.[347] By viewing water as a resource or commodity to be privatised, controlled and traded in the hands of corporations, governments fail to recognise the cultural and spiritual significance of water for First Peoples, where water is kin.

First Peoples have been fighting for water justice since colonisation, where settler-colonial systems and policy have contributed to the erosion of First Peoples’ rights and water health. Native Title legislation, and subsequent state and local government initiatives have failed to centre First Peoples’ relationship to water in management plans. In New South Wales, there was a 17.2 percent decrease in First Peoples’ water entitlements from 2008-2018, contributing to ongoing colonial violence by governments disregarding the cultural values of water managed by First Peoples.

Water-dependent cultural values include:[348]

Issue: Inappropriate extraction for bottled water

In addition to large volumes of water being extracted for industrial agriculture and food exports, there are a number of other inappropriate forms of water extraction for commodities. In 2019, farmers in New South Wales formed the Tweed Water Alliance to fight back against Coca Cola Amatil for extracting groundwater for bottled water.[349] 

Studies from the University of Queensland[350] outline key issues with Coca Cola and other extractive companies mining water. The bottled water industry in Australia is valued at $700 million, where the average cost of water per packaged bottle is around $3 (compared to $3 per 1000L for drinkable tap water). For consumers, drinking bottled water poses significant health risks from bisphenol A (BPA) and other contaminants, where guidelines are lower than the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines.

There are indeed circumstances which leave people with no other choice than to drink bottled water, particularly for communities during natural disasters, or where other extractive industries such as mining render drinking water unsafe. However, water extraction for the purpose of marketing and selling bottled water to Australians for no other purpose than profits impinges on the rights of First Peoples, communities and farmers, and it does so in spite of increasing water scarcity. 

Issue: Industrial aquaculture is killing marine and coastal ecosystems

Australia’s marine and coastal waters are some of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems, from fish to coral reefs. It is deeply saddening to reach a point in history where the impacts of industrial activity and climate change can be seen through mass bleaching events on coral in Queensland. Ecological destruction from industry is not confined to activities on land, but also includes commercial fishing where marine and coastal waters have suffered significant biodiversity loss from overfishing, pollution, habitat loss and disease. In April 2023, Australia recorded the worst mass fish kill in living memory, as millions of dead fish were found floating along the Darling-Baaka, due to toxic blackwater from recent flood events being released into marine ecosystems[351].

Humans under capitalism abuse the ecosystems of which we are part–and on which we depend. Capitalists are, for instance, happy to view the ocean as both a storage facility for the seafood we have yet to catch and a sinkhole for the detritus we produce on land. The balance of food and trash will soon tip. By 2050, two years after the last commercial fish catch is projected to land, there will be more plastic in the sea than fish.[352]

The 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reported that:

loss of coastal habitats and coral reefs reduces coastal protection, which increases the risk of floods and hurricanes to life and property for the 100 million to 300 million people living within coastal 100-year flood zones.[353] 

A key message in the summary for policymakers is that:

Economic incentives have generally favoured expanding economic activity, and often environmental harm, over conservation or restoration. Incorporating the consideration of the multiple values of ecosystem functions and of nature’s contributions to people into economic incentives has, in the economy, been shown to permit better ecological, economic and social outcomes.[354]

The damage wrought by Tasmania’s salmon industry is well documented. In 2018, Tasmania’s Environment Protection Authority (EPA) confirmed 1.35 million salmon died in Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania’s west coast when disease tore through the intensively confined fish pens.

In 2017, it was revealed high stocking limits at Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania’s west coast had created a ‘dead zone’ around a Tassal lease. Tasmania’s largest fish farmer was forced to destock the Franklin lease and the EPA slashed the harbour’s overall stocking limit.[355]

In this time of an increasing rate of climate change, we cannot afford to allow further polluting of land or marine based ecosystems through the expansion of unsustainable intensive livestock systems (including aquaculture).

Issue: Blue Economy vs Blue Justice

Asia and the Pacific region are the largest producers of fish at 61 percent of the world’s catch.[356] A ‘game-changing solution’ under the UNFSS ‘Action Area 2: Boost Nature-Based Solutions of Production’ calls for an Alliance of Blue Foods, acknowledging the importance of fisheries to livelihoods and nutrition for much of the world. However, global dialogues around sustainable fisheries and aquaculture to date typically focus on Blue Economies – the need to increase ‘sustainable’ harvests from fresh and marine fisheries, and to radically increase the volume of production from intensive aquaculture for food and nutrition security in the Global South. Civil society organisations including La Vía Campesina and the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) have for many years rejected the proposals to boost production from over-fished inland and marine waters and intensive aquaculture, highlighting the devastation already wrought to terrestrial and marine ecosystems by intensive livestock production.

In contrast, representatives for fisherfolk globally are demanding Blue Justice, which ensures food sovereignty through social justice, gender equity, environmental justice, ecosystem services, economic benefits, tenure access and empowering fishing communities who depend on the aquatic resources. Blue Justice is a much-needed counter-narrative to the pro-growth agenda of multinationals that dominates global fisheries governance. ‘Blue Justice Alert: An Interactive Platform for Securing Small Scale Fisheries[357] is a welcome development supporting the efforts of the world’s fisherfolk to protect lives and livelihoods by providing a platform for horizontal knowledge sharing about the challenges they face and the ways they are addressing them (see also: Murtuwarra case study below).

False Solutions

Peoples’ Actions

What can I do?

What can my community do?

Collectivise, organise, act!

What can schools do?

What can universities do?

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:


Case Studies

Mildura Community Water Bank , Victoria, (Australia)

Mildura Community Water Bank (MCWB)[362] is a non‑profit venture that seeks to cultivate a portfolio of water rights to assist active sustainable farming, direct‑to‑consumer food consumption and the health of river systems. Operating through a crowdfunding model, people can donate money or water to the bank, to ensure small-scale farmers have access to sustainable water supply. Small-scale farmers can also apply for a water grant, under which they are given fixed-price, temporary water allocations that are passed on to local communities through the provision of food.

Water is Life: Traditional Owner Access to Water Roadmap, Victoria (Australia)

The Victorian Government released the Water is Life: Traditional Owner Access to Water Roadmap[363] for consultation in 2022, which aims to engage with local First Peoples to co-manage and co-design state and local water policy. Through a ‘restorative justice approach’, the Victorian Government presents options to return water to Traditional Owners and to increase their power in the way that water is managed. The Victorian Government will work with Traditional Owners and the water sector to strengthen the role of Traditional Owners in water planning and management and by working to return water entitlements to Traditional Owners, as water becomes available. Returning water and increasing the power and resources of Traditional Owners on Country can help to revive culture and contribute to an improved sense of identity. This process will continue to respect existing entitlements to water.

In this case, AFSA must acknowledge that there are limitations to meaningful action towards First Peoples having rightful ownership and management of water under any government policy. However, this case study seeks to illustrate a critical shift in thinking about water as a living being part of First Peoples and traditional landscapes, beyond a resource to be extracted and commodified.

.

Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council

In Western Australia, there is critical work being done by the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council, an Indigenous-led organisation guided by a diverse representation of senior elders with cultural authority, knowledge holders on the front line, defending against the destruction of cultural heritage, ecological damage, poverty and climate change.[364] 

It is the Council’s aim to ensure that the Martuwarra Fitzroy River has its rights to live and flow protected as a living ancestor. First Peoples’ knowledge in caring for Country extends to water as kin, where songlines and traditional knowledges are passed down by generations to understand local Traditional Custodians’ connection to River, where she came from and where she is going.

The Council also aims to engage in a consultative process with government and other stakeholders to ensure co-design includes co-decision making on water planning and adaptive management to fully understand the cumulative social, cultural and environmental impacts of water allocation plans across the Catchment. It is this blend of Indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge that supports agroecological approaches to sustainable water management and water justice. 

Fair Fish, South Australia

Fair Fish (SA) is a Community Supported Fishery (CSF); a grass roots, alternative business model for local fishermen to sell their seafood. They allow direct sales to local consumers and provide a facility that encourages community engagement and food traceability. The original model allowed consumers to purchase a share of the day’s catch directly from local fishermen through an online platform.

By directly connecting fishers to consumers, Fair Fish aims to tell the stories of fishers by offering a portal into their lives and work. This includes the sustainability of their environment, the different types of fishing methods and pairing fish with recipes from local chefs in Adelaide.

Fair Fish shares local fishers’ cultural knowledge of peak seasons for a variety of seafood varieties. In doing so, it aims to revive traditional food values of seasonal availability and provenance.

Indian villages defeating Coca-Cola

In 2014, 18 village councils in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh demanded that a local Coca-Cola bottling plant be banned from extracting groundwater. The councils claimed that, since the plant began operations in 1999, Coca-Cola has been restricting villagers’ and farmers' access to water, encroaching on villagers’ land and ignoring labour laws.[365] In 2003, the Uttar Pradesh factory was also found to be contaminated with high levels of cadmium, lead and chromium – waste sludge which they then offloaded as ‘free fertiliser’ onto tribal farmers living near the plant.[366] Following years of campaigning and several large protests, and despite contestation from the multinational corporation [MNC], the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board ordered that the company shut down its $25-million plant in June that year.[367]

The Board also insisted that Coca-Cola replenish the depleted groundwater by twice the amount it had extracted and that it reduce pollutants to below permissible levels. This forced closure caused a ripple of unease within the industry, as well as checks on the water status of other soft drinks bottlers across the country. Although the fight between farmers and Coca-Cola is still ongoing – Coca-Cola operates 58 water-intensive bottling plants across India and continues to dry up groundwater and local wells[368] – the closure represents an historic example of years of farmer-led campaigns being recognised and protected by their representative governments.

Biodiversity is Biosecurity

Context

Australian biosecurity strategies have long been limited to surveillance and control, completely ignoring prevention of the origins of biosecurity threats. Prevention does not begin at the border or the farm gate, it begins on the farm. Many emergent diseases such as novel porcine and avian influenza are born of intensive livestock production, a model that evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace asserts produces ‘food for flu’[369] – because ‘raising vast monocultures removes immunogenetic firebreaks that in more diverse populations cut off transmission booms’.[370]

Imperial expansion and colonial ‘development’ are the original invasive systems that have led to a catastrophic loss of biodiversity and First Peoples’ traditional biocultural knowledges and practices, and consequent increasing biosecurity threats. Any strategy that seeks to understand the growing threats to ecosystems (including humans and more-than-humans), cultures, and economies must put First Peoples first to centre their right to self-determination and Country, and learn from traditional knowledges how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders propose to act. 

Invasiveness has come to be understood as emergent, achieved by species’ traits conferring with the specificities of the pathway on offer and the opportunities in the receiving environment.[371]

So long as governments continue to scope biosecurity strategies with narrowly conceived categories of management of exotic and established exotic pests, weeds, and diseases, they fail to take a systems approach that acknowledges the complex interactions between species in ecosystems, and the history of colonial Invasion that brings us to the current vulnerable state of Australia’s food and agriculture systems.

We must end the ‘whack-a-mole’ approach to biosecurity that fails to ask why diseases are emergent in the first place (intensive monocultures are producing diseases and increased pathogen loads), and why those same production models are fundamentally lacking the resilience to cope with incursions when they do occur. Addressing the loss of biodiversity in agro-ecosystems is central to halting the increase in biosecurity threats facing the world today.

Issue: Loss of biodiversity

Industrial agriculture is a major driver of climate change and biodiversity loss.[372] Widespread land conversion, habitat loss, excessive pesticide usage, and a range of other direct and indirect factors, impact and threaten on- and off-farm biodiversity, with disastrous consequences on ecosystems and their human and more-than-human inhabitants. Industrial agricultural practices diminish soil biodiversity and therefore soil fertility, threatening the future of food and nutritional security.

In Australia as elsewhere, the rise of fast-growing, high-yielding industrial genetics has led to a concomitant loss of rare- and heritage-seed varieties and breeds of livestock. The Rare Breeds Trust of Australia (RBTA) notes how in Australia, the erosion of cattle biodiversity has led to around 83 percent of the dairy herd consisting of Holstein–Friesians.[373] They highlight how among Holsteins, the intensity of selection for milk volume has compromised other traits resulting in metabolic and structural problems, increased production disease prevalence, and reduced fertility and longevity in the breed. Whilst the movement to preserve Australia’s heritage breed livestock has been gaining traction for at least two decades, it is still nascent and unsupported by government policy.[374] 

In addition to the lack of policy supporting agricultural biodiversity, there is also a notable dearth of academic or industry research in Australia on the importance of biodiversity in agriculture.[375] Recent initiatives such as the Australian Farm Biodiversity Certification Scheme Trial funded by the Federal Government Department of Agriculture, Water and Environment[376] demonstrate all too clearly how far Australia has to go in understanding the urgent need for transformation of agriculture, as to date it does not explicitly include any focus on increasing biodiversity in agricultural produce, only in the landscape surrounding production areas. In fact, most government biodiversity strategies are silent on the importance of biodiversity in and for agriculture, referring only to wild or native plants and animals, as though biodiversity only happens in the shelterbelts, ignoring farmland itself, which constitutes more than half of Australian land use.[377] 

To no small extent, this perhaps stems from the ‘land sparing’ conservation argument that posits human activity as inherently separate from and detrimental to nature. This leads to a key misconception surrounding the effects of livestock – and farming in general – on biodiversity: that all farmers manage ecosystems equally. There is an inescapable distinction between the large-scale intensive livestock farmers, who intensively house one or two breeds of livestock and erode the soil quality and biodiversity of surrounding ecosystems, and the Indigenous, peasant and small-scale farmers who have managed pasture-based livestock alongside healthy, biodiverse agro-ecosystems for millenia[378]. Generalisations across the spectrum of livestock management practices ignore the diversities in scale, ecosystem management, and livestock biodiversity that exist across these farms. Such generalisations are further problematic in their preference towards false solutions such as nature-based solutions, payments for environmental services (such as carbon markets), and farm lock-ups, which are discussed at length in ‘False Solutions’.

Agricultural biodiversity is disappearing rapidly as a result. This encompasses a range of essential biodiversity for sustainable food production, including soil biota, pollinators, and genetically diverse seed. Industrial agriculture, forestry, and fisheries systems use homogeneous, proprietary seeds, trees, breeds and aquatic species, scientifically bred and often genetically modified to include limited traits, which are useful to industry. They are grown in simplified agroecosystems that are heavily contaminated with biocides and other agrochemicals.

Biodiversity losses extend across wild and domestic animal species and, as of 2016, ‘559 of the 6,190 domesticated breeds of mammals used for food and agriculture (over 9%) had become extinct and at least 1,000 more are threatened’.[379] In addition, while 300,000 species of plant have edible parts, just 20 species account for 90 percent of the world’s food and three - wheat, maize and rice - supply more than half.[380] This poses ‘a serious risk to global food security by undermining the resilience of many agricultural systems to threats such as pests, pathogens, and climate change’.[381] 

Issue: Biosecurity threats are increasing

Three out of four of all new and emerging human infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin, and a study in the journal Nature found that conventional agriculture was associated with half of all the zoonotic pathogens[382] that emerged in humans in that time.[383] 

Highly pathogenic strains of what Bulach et al. (2010) reported are monophyletic H7N3, H7N4, and H7N7 were documented on large broiler and layer poultry operations in Victoria and Queensland as far back as the 1970s (Cross 1986/2003, Westbury 1998). An on-site increase in the virulence of an avian influenza H7N4 strain from low to high pathogenicity in 1997 was documented on a large commercial broiler-breeder operation of 128,000 birds (Selleck et al. 2003).[384]

Why this association? Because capitalist industrial agriculture is a recipe for biodiversity suppression and erosion, which is ergo a major contributor to the development of pandemics. Amassing thousands of genetically identical animals in close quarters creates the conditions for pathogens to thrive and potentially mutate to infect other organisms close by, including people.

Such ills are often managed in comparatively sterile, though at such densities still pathogen-conducive, conditions, requiring continuous applications of vaccine and pharmaceuticals in livestock to reduce now endemic diarrheas and respiratory diseases. Pesticides are applied to crops largely engineered for withstanding still greater petrochemical application, selecting for superweeds and pests.[385]

In some parts of the world microbes have already evolved to resist 80 percent of the antibiotics used on animals.[386]

When chickens, pigs or cows are forced to live in crowded conditions - sometimes by the tens of thousands - disease is inevitable. This has led to the widespread use, and overuse of antimicrobial drugs in farming.[387]

The role monocultures of livestock and crops play in disease emergence has been known for decades, just as it has been known that smallholder, low-input farming rarely breeds such potential disasters.[388] Biodiversity-rich farms, therefore, are the most effective form of biosecurity we have, as they are both a form of prevention of outbreaks and system-level resilience when they occur.

Issue: Intensive livestock increases the risk of zoonotic diseases

Perhaps the greatest biosecurity (and public health) threats of our time are the rise of zoonotic diseases. Long, complicated supply chains and free trade agreements are contributing to the rapid spread of diseases (such as African Swine Fever and Foot and Mouth Disease), while small-scale pastured livestock production in agroecological systems selling meat in direct supply chains reduces the risks of disease emergence and spread, while also being far more able to adapt to climate change (itself also a known contributor to the rise and spread of zoonoses, such as Japanese Encephalitis Virus’ appearance in southern Australia for the first time in 2021).

It is worth quoting a 2021 FAO thematic paper on One Health at length, which categorises the three major anthropogenic drivers of zoonotic disease emergence as below (these are also aligned with Australia’s Strategy for Nature 2019-2030).[389] 

  • Modifications to natural habitats. These include climate and land-use changes, development (urban or agricultural), dams, extractive industries, loss of biodiversity, ecosystem services, natural resources and habitat, encroachment on natural habitats, and environmental contamination;                        
  • Changes in agricultural practices. These include agricultural intensification and expansion of crop, livestock and aquaculture farming, changes in food value chains (global or across country/regional borders), waste management (of water, faeces, antimicrobials, runoffs), unregulated use of antibiotics, globalised value chains, and marketing; and                                        
  • Human behaviour and choices. These include increased utilisation/exploitation of wildlife for exclusive food consumption in urban centres (wildlife, bushmeat), traditional medicines using animal body parts or organs, and exotic pet ownership.[390]

Issue: The need to shift One Health approaches upstream

ONE HEALTH

One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystems. It recognises the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent.

The approach mobilises multiple sectors, disciplines and communities at varying levels of society to work together to foster well-being and tackle threats to health and ecosystems, while addressing the collective need for clean water, energy and air, safe and nutritious food, taking action on climate changes and contributing to sustainable development.[391]

In an ecological context, One Health promotes the health of people, biodiversity, and ecosystems, and therefore needs to address the root causes of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation.[392]

One Health has yet to work on protecting or restoring biodiversity and ecosystems as upstream interventions to prevent and mitigate health threats. Spillover risk mitigation measures are limited as countries typically take a partial One Health approach that includes the veterinary and public health sectors but leaves out the agriculture, wildlife and environment sectors. This approach means that prevention is not a part of the solution, which places biodiversity and ecosystems at further risk of degradation and makes spillover events more likely.[393]

Systems thinking is not new. Many traditional philosophies associated with Indigenous communities who have lived in and managed ecosystems for thousands of years are based on understanding of and respect for the systems that sustain life in their local areas, paradigms which align well with the principles and practices of agroecology.[394] The narrow attention within biosecurity to circulating risks, which demands protocols too costly for small-scale farmers to implement, supports the further imposition of industrial farming as part of the solution.

Governments must look to the health of production systems to address biosecurity risks before they are created in sheds of immuno-compromised genetically identical pigs and poultry or in vast monocultures of annual crops. Until the drivers of disease emergence are addressed, we will continue to pay the price.

Issue: Capitalising on biodiversity

We reject the notion that nature is capital. The intrinsic value of nature to society has long been advanced by the world’s Indigenous Peoples, and also by many Western philosophers over the last two millennia including those as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Yet since the 1980s, Australian agricultural policy has pursued a strong neoliberal logic,[395] and looking after nature has shifted from a moral obligation to an economic opportunity. Payments for ecosystem services have been on the rise, because as political ecologist Sian Sullivan puts it, in this ‘zeitgeist of crisis capitalism’, the theory goes that ‘if nature can be rationally abstracted and priced into assets, goods and services, then environmental risk and degradation can be measured, exchanged, offset and generally minimised’.[396]

Water, carbon and biodiversity should not be privatised and traded as fungible assets.

Living with nature means that it is visible by definition. ‘Money’ – the universal equivalent that is supposedly the tool to make nature ‘visible’ under capitalism – only renders nature visible on spreadsheets and through necessarily simplistic, technocratic decision-making models outside of relevant contexts. This renders nature unidimensional – solely what it is worth to humans-as-investors.[397]

To illustrate, building a mine on one side of the country but offsetting biodiversity on the other is not a fungible (1 to 1) trade. Worse, market mechanisms to reduce emissions are already failing, according to the Australia Institute:

Australia Institute research has shown that 25% of Australian carbon credits are hot air. Recent allegations suggest that the real number could be as high as 80% of all credits.  This is coupled with inadequate emissions regulation in Australia, and carbon credits being used as a fig leaf by big emitters to justify increased fossil fuel production. There is little to provide assurance that a biodiversity conservation market won’t have equally damaging outcomes.[398]

Issue: Domestic invasive species

Perhaps one of the most difficult issues we collectively face in protecting and enhancing biodiversity is the impact of domestic pets and other animals on biodiversity, such as cats, dogs, horses and rabbits. Australians love their pets, where cats and dogs are the most popular choice of domestic animals kept in homes across the country. Having a conversation about the impact of pets and other domestic animals on biodiversity does not discount that pets are wonderful companions that improve our mental health and wellbeing. Rather, it’s about responsible pet and domestic animal ownership to ensure the health and wellbeing of all life in our natural environment.

If you’re a cat owner, you’ll know that cats are highly intelligent, curious creatures with a natural instinct for hunting. Every day in Australia, cats kill 3.2 million mostly native mammals; 1.2 million mostly native birds; 1.9 million mostly native reptiles; 0.25 million native frogs; and 3 million invertebrates.[399] A single pet cat will on average hunt and kill 196 mammals, birds and reptiles per year if let outside to roam. Despite their impact on biodiversity, our beloved feline friends are also vulnerable to being killed by traffic, snakes, toads and other wildlife outdoors so keeping them indoors or in a contained outdoor space promotes their own safety as well as for other animals.

Both domestic and wild dogs are also a threat to native wildlife, and are considered a risk to at least 14 native animals, birds and reptiles.[400] Meanwhile, horses and camels can have detrimental impacts on the natural environment, as they overgraze endangered plant communities; affect plant and animal abundance and diversity; spread invasive plants; erode soil; and increase sediment in waterways.[401] Feral horse trampling reduces the organic layer of soils, increases soil compaction and run-off, and reduces water infiltration and nutrient recycling.[402] Rabbits also contribute to ecological degradation by: overgrazing native and sown pastures, leading to loss of plant biodiversity and reduced crop yields; competing with native animals and domestic livestock for food and shelter; increasing grazing pressure and lowering the land’s carrying capacity; building warrens, causing land degradation and erosion; preventing or inhibiting the regeneration of native shrubs and trees by grazing; increasing and spreading invasive weeds; and acting as a food source for introduced predators, which can lead to increased lamb losses and disease prevalence, and a decrease in small mammal diversity.[403]

Take note of Peoples’ Actions below to ensure you’re following responsible pet owner guidelines for domesticated animals.

False Solutions

Peoples’ Actions

What can I do?

What can my community do?

Collectivise, organise, act!

What can schools do?

What can universities do?

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations 

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Case Studies

Rare Breeds Trust of Australia[415] 

The Rare Breeds Trust Australia (RBTA) is a non-profit organisation founded by a group of animal breeders and conservationists. They work to promote and educate the public on the need to conserve livestock genetic diversity. Concerned with the threats to the genetic diversity of heritage breed livestock, the movement has been working for the last two decades to inform the general public about the unique breeds which need to be preserved for future generations. They believe that the genetic diversity offered by rare breeds is vital in maintaining the longevity, disease resistance, climate adaptability and structural soundness of a sustainable food system. As such their efforts include monitoring breed numbers; maintaining a website and blog informing readers on the qualities of individual breeds, the importance of livestock, and broader information on agricultural biodiversity; updating members on the latest livestock regulations for each state; and establishing a gene bank to preserve breed diversity into the future. Genetic and financial donations are welcome, with current genetic material including the Belmont Red, Tuli, Mandalong Special, British White and Timor Pony species.

The Diggers Club/Foundation[416]

The Diggers Club was established on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Eastern Kulin, Melbourne in 1978. Since then it has expanded to a 90,000 member Diggers Club/Foundation, with a mission to encourage and inspire gardeners to create productive, sustainable and organic gardens throughout Australia. The movement actively opposes genetically-engineered seeds and celebrates the diversity of open-pollinated heirloom seeds. Their memberships offer seasonal educational magazines, factsheets and personalised advice to novice and experienced gardeners. With every new membership or renewal of an existing membership, they donate a packet of heirloom seeds into our community pool to assist garden groups, schools and community organisations across Australia. Their online shop sells a diverse variety of plants and seeds including heirlooms, garden supplies and trees. They also operate community programs such as Tree Planting Projects; a Seed Saver Trial Garden, where they trial the seeds donated to them from home gardeners across the country; and the Diggers Seed Preservation Garden, where they offer education programs for children and adults alike to learn seed lifecycles, seed harvesting techniques, and how to maximise seed viability.

Tuerong Farm[417]

Tuerong Farm is a 60ha peri-urban farm on the land of the Bunurong People, the Mornington Peninsula, VIC. Jason Cotter and Emma Hicks produce milling wheat, malting barley and beef. Their practices focus on soil health and input minimisation, alongside long-term bushland and riparian zone restoration. They are most renowned as a key driver behind the Australian local grains revival, operating an on-farm mill and bakery while increasing the diversity of non-commodity wheat available to bakers, chefs and home cooks. They have slowly amassed and trialled a large collection of heritage and other specialist grains, including via genebanks and collecting trips abroad. They have re-established grain production and processing on the Mornington Peninsula, and are now milling a diverse variety of hard and soft red wheats, white and purple wheats, maize and the ancient grain emmer. They are also working with newer cereal lines, such as perennial wheat and genetically diverse population wheats. They focus on cultivars and practices that prioritise flavour, nutrition, ease of digestion and sustainability. By revitalising the diversity of wheat and bread in the region, they aim to promote an agroecology and food system that is supportive of habitat, human health and biodiversity.

Value Chain

Context

A 2022 report by the ETC Group has found that almost 43 percent of the global grocery retail market is controlled by two companies (Walmart and Schwarz Group).[418] In Australia, the concentration is even more extreme, with Coles and Woolworths controlling 66 percent of the grocery retail market – more than Aldi, IGA, and independent outlets combined.[419] This highly concentrated ‘duopoly’ distribution model strongly disadvantages producers, especially small-scale farmers, as powerful retailers are able to unilaterally set the terms of contracts and increase their own profit margins at the expense of suppliers. In addition to the stronghold retailers have over Australian food sales, processors can retain as much as 70 percent of the average food dollar,[420] with increasing vertical integration across sectors of agriculture that have been intensifying for decades (e.g. dairy, pigs, and poultry).

This model leads to increased food waste, weak and inflexible long supply chains, and an alienated food culture where most consumers are disconnected from their food and its producers.

‘It’s never been more important to buy Australian than right now’— was the catchphrase of the promotional initiative from the Australian Made Campaign Ltd in 2020. In Mintel’s Global Consumer research, 54% of Australians say they try to buy locally-grown food. It makes sense, especially during times of uncertainty, where consumers gravitate toward what they know and trust. This stems from their desire to know where their products are coming from and help the local community. For instance, we’ve seen how the awareness of the struggles faced by local sellers has grown during the pandemic, and consumers want to show their support. Furthermore, this spotlights the shift towards self-sufficiency by leveraging the value of Australian made products while balancing them with overseas imports.[421]

AFSA’s own research (2022-23) into food sourcing shows that people who have access to ethical/ecologically-sound foods seem to recognise that wealth plays a role in privileging their position. Similarly, those who buy from supermarkets acknowledge that lack of wealth and food pricing support a preference for food within budget.

A Local Food Initiative research project,[422] started in 2014 (and still running) supported by Southern Harvest Association, Canberra City Farm (CCF), South East Producers Association (SCPA), Urban Agriculture Australia, and Slow Food amongst others, showed that consumers were having trouble identifying and accessing local food, and that producers were having trouble finding ways to market their produce in the local area. The top three solutions identified by both producers and consumers were: (i) easily identifiable local food stocks in existing local retail outlets, (ii) farmer to eater food box schemes, and (iii) local farmers markets.

Issue: Corporate capture of native food value chain

Worth AUD $20 million in 2021[423], the interest in Australian native fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and spices is exploding with native goods appearing on menus in high-end restaurants, premium food and beauty products.. However First Peoples’ knowledge and intellectual property surrounding seeds, food and medicine plants are being co-opted by non-indigenous businesses, and to a large extent corporate, capitalist interests. This extends right through the value chain for native foods with little to no permission or acknowledgement of First Peoples’ traditional knowledge. Indigenous representation in the native food supply chain – from the grower through to the exporter – is around one percent.[424]

This lack of representation is about more than just money. For Indigenous Australians, the native foods of their region form a key part of their deep connection to country. And the knowledge that’s tied to each food from each country has been passed down for millennia.[425]

Issue: Farmers are losing access to processing infrastructure

For decades, farmers have been losing access to critical infrastructure to transform whole produce into market-ready food. The most notable examples include the concentration of dairy processing (in 2015-16 just five processors processed 79 percent of volume produced) and abattoirs (in Victoria there are just two poultry processors remaining for private kills, only one of which sometimes accepts new farmers, with devastating effects on the capacity for the small-scale poultry farming movement to grow), as well as boning rooms as further processing is increasingly completed in abattoir boning rooms and meat sold as boxed meat to supermarkets and high street butchers. At the time of writing, Woolworths has just announced the closure of the majority of its in-store butchers,[426] with Coles having stopped in 2021.[427] 

Issue: Australian food distribution is a duopoly

The ACCC notes that power in a bargaining relationship (i.e. between the farmer selling their produce and the retailer buying it) is determined by the number of alternative options that each party has.[428] In the case of a supermarket duopoly, farmers have few alternative options to sell their produce, and retailers are thereby able to impose their own terms of price and standards[429]. This is not solely a question of paying low wholesale prices and increasing profit margins at the retail level. The two major supermarkets have also engaged in more aggressive tactics, such as requiring suppliers to pay ‘slotting fees’ to rent out premium supermarket shelf space,[430] forcing suppliers to absorb the cost of unsold products,[431] and requesting ‘voluntary’ contributions to help pay for supermarket promotional

campaigns.[432] For small-scale producers in particular, the pressure on already-slim profit margins threatens the viability of their operations. Although the grocery code of conduct introduced in 2013 restricts some tactics of supply chain squeeze, it is purely voluntary, and large retailers’ market power may allow them to sidestep it entirely. Across the Tasman, the New Zealand government is considering breaking up the duopoly of Woolworths and Foodstuffs, in response to a study by the Commerce Commission which found that the current model is not working well for either suppliers or consumers.[433]

Woolworths is the nation's favourite supermarket, with 48% of Australians saying they primarily shop there, followed by Coles (39%). A further 10% say Aldi is their supermarket of choice, while 2% opt for IGA.[434]

Issue: More food is wasted than is needed to feed hungry Australians

The supermarket duopoly also leads to significant food waste at harvest. While both Coles and Woolworths have aligned with food charities in corporate social responsibility initiatives to redirect unsold or ‘surplus’ food, research has revealed a number of contradictions in this arrangement.[435] Most notably, a large volume of perfectly edible produce does not even reach the shelves (i.e. has no opportunity to be redirected to charity) due to supermarket aesthetic standards and production volumes. No transparent data on this phenomenon of ‘upstream’ food waste exist in Australia, but US research estimates that when this waste stream is added to retail and consumer waste, about half of all produce grown is thrown away.[436] The power of large supermarkets to shift risk – and associated wastage – onto producers is a key part of this problem. For example, a Tasmanian lettuce grower contracted to Woolworths had to plant crops to fill the supermarket’s largest possible supply order, but would usually bulldoze most of it back into the ground:

I have to grow for the maximum size of an order, or else I lose the contract. So I grow on that scale even though the order is usually a lot less. Everything I don’t sell, I have to destroy.[437]

The demands of large retailers thereby impose false and unsustainable economies of scale, where farmers are forced to overproduce and huge volumes of perfectly edible, nutritious food is wasted. This is apparently to ensure that supermarket shelves are never empty. However, the COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated that distribution models relying on long supply chains are the most vulnerable when crisis hits. Australian food supply chains have lengthened in recent years in response to consolidation policies of the dominant supermarkets, which have reduced the number of distribution centres in order to maximise economic efficiencies. Supply chain interruptions and panic buying showed up the weaknesses in the ‘just in time’ model, with supermarket shelves empty of many basic products such as eggs, pasta, and meat. Meanwhile, many farmers faced the sudden closure of their usual market channels, as the operations of some farmers’ markets and food services businesses ceased.

For large-scale farms, this spelled disaster. For example, a watermelon grower in the Northern Territory whose market was primarily restaurants, caterers, and airlines had very little choice but to watch the melons rot in the fields. With 600 tonnes versus a pallet of produce to sell, selling direct to eaters was not an option. However, small-scale farmers had significantly greater capacity to pivot to a greater diversity of direct sales channels. Entities such as Open Food Network[438] rose to the challenge to bring a thrilling wave of new farmers onto their platform to directly connect with eaters looking for alternatives to the supermarkets. The upsurge in people seeking direct sales from farmers was breathtaking. For example, one beef producer saw an 85 to 100% increase in direct orders during the first month of the pandemic, which allowed them to cover their costs in the absence of restaurant sales and on-farm tourism operations.[439] Another organic producer went from delivering 300 produce boxes per week to 800, while others reported an initial spike in interest which steadied out to around 30% growth over time.[440] Although there were some adaptation challenges involved – for example, developing systems to support the massive increase in demand – small-scale producers were able to succeed in providing food where long supply chains failed. The pandemic demonstrated that globalised food systems are brittle and threatened, while local food systems, solidarity economies, and strongly networked and collectivised communities are strong.

Alternative distribution models, based in localised networks and drawing on close relationships between producers and consumers, present farmers with the option of greater financial security, risk sharing, and connection with the people who eat their produce, while connecting eaters with the places and people who grow their food. Given the grassroots nature of these models, good policy in this area relies less on intervention and more on enabling scale appropriate regulation that supports small-scale farmers. In addition to scale-appropriate regulation, policymakers can strengthen localised food economies by removing obstacles for small-scale food producers throughout the value chain from production and processing, right through to distribution and consumption. For example, a key barrier to resilient local food systems in Australia is a lack of processing infrastructure for small-scale farmers[441] (See more: Land and water-use section on planning law).

Issue: Corporate control extends to food and agricultural policy

When the Australian Government developed the (now disbanded) National Food Plan over a decade ago, it enlisted three key actors in the process of identifying challenges and opportunities for agriculture, and strategic targets supported by government policies: The Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestries (DAFF), the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) and the Global Foundation.[442]

The Global Foundation is a registered charity funded by stakeholders within Australia’s private sector. At the time of developing the National Food Plan, the Global Food Foundation launched a Food Security Working Group, which included representatives from Woolworths. In 2010, a National Food Policy Working Group was established to include agribusiness representatives from the National Farmers Federation (NFF) and Woolworths. Lack of broad representation from smallholders and civil society prompted strong criticism of the Working Group, in addition to lack of transparency in policy processes where meeting minutes were not made public.

Had the National Food Plan been adopted and implemented by subsequent Governments, strategic targets supported by food and agricultural policy would have been geared in favour of agribusiness. It was in response to the National Food Plan, that AFSA was formed through collectivising and releasing the original Peoples’ Food Plan. At a global scale, the food sovereignty movement was born out of weak policy by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) around the time that food security was flagged as an issue of global importance.

When it comes to fixing the food value chain through the lens of food sovereignty, governments must start by offering everyone a seat at the table of policy processes to address power inequities in our food system.

Issue: Comfort, convenience and the gig economy

One of the biggest barriers to food sovereignty from an eater’s perspective is convenience. Global corporations such as Amazon and Uber (Google) have increased Peoples' appetite for goods and services at the tap of a button to be delivered fast, at low cost. Demand for expedited food services has been fulfilled by companies like Menulog, DoorDash and UberEats, where eaters can order a wide range of meals from their favourite restaurants then eagerly track its arrival through the ordering app.

For many Australians, ordering ‘takeout’ was once a pastime reserved for special occasions or Friday nights to mark the end of the working week. Even in 2018, “an average of 2.73 meals per week were prepared outside the home, with higher frequencies among men, younger ages, and more highly educated participants. A wide variety of sources for these foods was observed, with fast-food outlets being most common. Around one-quarter of all foods prepared outside the home were delivered.”[443] During the COVID-19 pandemic, the market size of the online food ordering and delivery has grown to $860.9 million in 2023, where the gig economy makes now makes up 78% of meal delivery services in Australia[444][445]. Now, eaters can purchase their entire grocery list from food to toiletries through UberEats and DoorDash without leaving the house. As the promise of comfort and convenience shifts eater habits, the gig economy has emerged to service how fast food and other basic items can be delivered.

The gig economy enables businesses to outsource food delivery to contract workers via digital platforms like UberEats. Under this setting, workers are considered independent contractors and therefore not entitled to the same conditions and entitlements as other employees, including superannuation, occupational health and safety training and workers’ compensation.[446] Local restaurants and cafes supplying food through digital platforms are also entitled to share a portion of profits with the service provider. So who really benefits from this distribution model? Not workers, not small businesses and certainly not farmers.

At this stage, there is no concrete data on the number of gig economy workers in Australia, however it is estimated that 7.1 percent of the population has sought short-term, contract work on digital platforms over the past 12 months, where UberEats alone employs around 59,000 contract workers.[447] For workers, the allure of the gig economy lies in flexibility and lack of formal qualifications needed to carry out task-based work. However, the pressure on workers to pick, pack and deliver food efficiently has led to several deaths of drivers, as well as serious injuries which are not covered by work insurance under contract jobs.[448] 

A report by Uber in 2021 showed UberEats delivery workers earned around just $5 for a 4km trip from food business to eater. Many food delivery workers are migrants, where low wages in high pressure task-based work is common in Australian agriculture.

Outside of the gig economy, the Federal Government announced a new Agricultural Visa for migrant and refugee workers, under which there also no protections or entitlements as would be legislated for citizens.[449] It is everyone’s responsibility, from individuals to governments to consider the human cost of fast and convenient food services we have come to demand.

False Solutions

Peoples’ Actions

What can I do?

What can my community do?

Collectivise, organise, act!

Collectivise for direct distribution models[450]

CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)

Members buy shares in an individual farm’s projected harvest in advance and for a set period (typically a season or a year) and receive regular deliveries. Members share in both the risks and benefits of the farm, but by mitigating risk through good farming practices and diversity, members will generally enjoy a full box.

Multi-farm cooperative

A group of farmers get together to market, plan, harvest, pack, and distribute a produce box. Pricing may be similar to CSA, in that members subscribe for a set period of time and share in both risks and bounty, or may be based on custom ad hoc weekly/monthly orders. Farmers have less administrative and marketing overhead and can specialise in a smaller number of crops, while eaters are provided with a more diverse box.

Food hub

The food hub is a dedicated distributor for local small-scale farms, with lower costs associated with transportation, marketing, administration, and packaging that allow it to pay a fair price to farmers and allows farmers access to larger markets and institutional procurement opportunities. Food hubs can be larger multi-farm cooperatives, or farmer/eater cooperatives, or other collaborative not-for-profit models. Food hubs might also include shared value chain infrastructure. Members can subscribe for a set period or order individual boxes on a one-off basis.

Food co-ops and bulk buyers’ groups

Consumers organise themselves in networks to buy and distribute food from local producers. There is typically a co-op membership fee, but the ability to buy in bulk means that members can pay lower wholesale prices. Food co-ops may develop direct relationships with producers and/or purchase through a food hub.

Direct or farm-gate sales

Individual farms offer a selection of products available for direct purchase via the farm gate or through an online store. This might include a produce box scheme where consumers can purchase a one-off box or choose the items in their box (rather than subscribing as per CSA).

Farmers’ market

Multi-stall markets where farmers can sell produce directly to consumers, usually on a regular basis (weekly or monthly are most common in Australia). Farmers’ markets offer the opportunity for direct contact and connection between producers and eaters as in CSA or farm gate sales, but without a subscription commitment.

Reko rings

Sales are made online (e.g. in a local Facebook group), whereby vendors list items and eaters pay and arrange pickup at a dedicated point and time.

What can schools do?

What can universities do?

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Case Studies

Jonai Farms and Meatsmiths (Victoria, Australia) - CSA[454]

Jonai Farms is a family of agroecologists raising pastured heritage-breed Large Black pigs and Speckleline cattle on unceded Djaara Country - djandak - in the central highlands of Victoria. They butcher, cook and cure in a boning room built from repurposed shipping containers on their 69 acre farm, and distribute their produce through a CSA membership and at the farm gate. Through their CSA, Jonai Farms aims to deepen their community of eaters' understanding of food production, in particular the treatment of animals and Land. By doing so, they aim to create a deeply localised thriving community which embraces degrowth as a philosophy to ensure sufficiency and solidarity for all. Their passion for agroecology and exiting the agro-industrial model has involved cutting out commodity grain for their pigs, and installing a 15kW solar system and battery to transition away from fossil fuels. They rotate their multiple livestock species around the farm to enhance fertility and biodiversity for the paddocks and overall agroecosystem. They believe that 'knowledge is power' and that promoting the principles of reciprocity, self-distribution, patience with Nature, and transparency about their holistic decision making is key in enabling a community of ethical eaters. Jonai Farms also offers Agroecology Dialogues, or days of horizontal knowledge sharing about science, the practices, and the social movement of agroecology.[455] 

Echo Valley (Goomburra, QLD) - CSA[456] 

Randal, Juanita, Eli and Bridey Breen run the 300 acre Echo Valley Farm on the Githabul Peoples' Country as part of the Bundjalung Nation, or Goomburra Valley, Queensland. Their multi-species integrated farming system includes cattle, poultry, pigs, grains and seasonal small cropping. Across these enterprises, the family has developed a system of farming which is ethical, sustainable, holistic and regenerative. Echo Valley Farms operates a CSA which provides ‘4 goods: good for the animals, good for the land, good for the farmer, and good for you’. Eaters receive weekly boxes of food direct from Echo Valley, including pastured eggs, regeneratively-raised beef, and BushRanger pork. At the time of writing, Echo Valley has just been granted a licence to operate an on-farm boning room - the meat room. This alternative model of food distribution allows farmers greater financial security and risk sharing, whilst giving consumers the opportunity to personally connect with how their food is being produced. Echo Valley also offers Agroecology Dialogues, or days of horizontal knowledge sharing about science, the practices, and the social movement of agroecology.[457] 

Southern Harvest (NSW/ACT, Australia) - Farmers Market and Multi-farm box[458]

The Southern Harvest Association (SHA) is a farmer and volunteer led non-profit working to enhance the availability of sustainable and local produce within the Southern Harvest bio-region. The SHA has multiple enterprises designed to create a more sustainable food distribution system within the region. Its yearly Bungendore Harvest Festival attracts 3000-8000 visitors each year and showcases local businesses in the community. SHA’s farmers markets in Bungendore (in the traditional lands of the Ngarigo, Ngambri, Ngunnawal/Ngunawal, Yuin, Wiradjuri, Gundungurra people Aboriginal people) and multi-farm box schemes connect local farmers directly to their local eaters. Southern Harvest Education facilitates access to education and supports the development of sustainable, local food and agricultural systems. Such enterprises serve to enhance a culture of sustainable, ethical and ecologically-just eating and farming systems within the region.

Mornington Peninsula Food Economy and Agroecology Strategy 2022-2028

The Mornington Peninsula Shire’s Food Economic and Agroecology Strategy is a ground-breaking local government policy which aims to drive sustainable growth in the agriculture, food and beverage sectors whilst enhancing the region’s ecology and biodiversity. It signals Australia’s first local policy to highlight the need for transformational industry change guided by principles and practices of agroecology, circular economies and regenerative local agriculture. It departs from the conventional use of gross and net financial returns often found in economic development strategies to consider the environmental and social benefits of the Strategy. As such, its 5 Pillars focus on:

  • Pillar 1: promoting collaboration between stakeholders to secure a more resilient and sustainable food economy (Pillar 1);
  • Pillar 2: reinvigorating the Mornington Peninsula Produce provenance brand based off a local regenerative agriculture certification system (Pillar 2);
  • Pillar 3: facilitating the regional uptake of regenerative, agroecological farming practices through certification schemes, incentives and land leasing (Pillar 3);
  • Pillar 4: engaging industry, schools and training organisation in training around regenerative agriculture and sustainable food production (Pillar 4);
  • Pillar 5: strengthening infrastructure for a circular food economy, including on-farm composting, organics recycling, recycled water schemes and renewables (Pillar 5).

The Strategy positions the Mornington Peninsula Shire as an exemplar food economy operating a sustainable food system production to protect the region against future supply and climate shocks.

Ocean Grove Farm (Collaroy, NSW)[459]

Like most inner-city dwellers with a desire to grow their own produce, Abi’s gardener dreams were limited by the lack of space she had in her Collaroy apartment in the Northern Beaches, Sydney. When a retired neighbour overheard her story and offered her his backyard space to grow clean, chemical-free food, therefore, she jumped at the opportunity. From this space grew Ocean Grove Farm, a 16x10 metre mini-market garden cramming a total of 14 garden beds.

Since 2019, Ocean Grove has operated a sustainable farming system by minimising water use through drip irrigation; using a no-dig, no-till planting method; and housing compost bins and worm farms which recycle scraps from local cafes and homes from the community. Her diverse plantings depend on the season, but include organic broccoli, spinach, chard, kale, Asian greens, shallots, kohlrabi, English spinach, radishes, leeks, celery, fennel, leafy salad greens, rockets mizuna and mustard greens. She also grows lots of flowers to support local pollinators.

 

With the help of the FoodLab Sydney entrepreneur course, which helped her understand the business side of running an urban farm, Ocean Grove now sells her greens through one of Abi’s local cafes. She also supplies five families in her local community through a subscription service.

 

Her example shows how, through perseverance and the help of friends, communities can unite to create local food cultures which minimise food waste and strengthen the connection between eaters and healthy, biodiverse food.

Food Safety

Context

Australia has a very low incidence of food safety outbreaks, and AFSA seeks to maintain this food safety track record, however, highlights the extreme compliance burden placed on small-and medium-scale food businesses.

Small- and medium-scale food businesses are currently asked to meet the same standards as large-scale food businesses and importers. For example, in small-scale egg production, where a pasture-based producer is grading 100 eggs per day by hand for local consumption within days (not weeks like industrial eggs), they have to undergo an identical accreditation process to an industrial battery farm producing hundreds of thousands of eggs per day. This calls for a decreased regulatory burden and widespread small-flock exemptions.

It is important to note that many small- and medium- scale food producers are also food businesses, who conduct processing and retailing of food, often selling direct to consumers. Therefore, the risk points that arise in the conventional industrial supply chain are vastly reduced, due to shorter supply chains resulting in less cold-chain risks and potential contamination points, as well as increased traceability.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) asserts that:

States shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that their rural development, agricultural, environmental, trade and investment policies and programmes contribute effectively to protecting and strengthening local livelihood options and to the transition to sustainable modes of agricultural production.

It further asserts that ‘States shall stimulate sustainable production, including agroecological production, whenever possible, and facilitate direct farmer-to-consumer sales.’[460] 

Issue: The rise of toxic and ultra-processed foods

We note that historically, food regulation to manage health risks have focused heavily on short-term, fast moving threats from pathogens passed through agricultural production. However, these reforms should seek to incorporate a focus on the number of toxic and ultra-processed foods sold in supermarket chains across Australia and New Zealand. While these foods may not pose an immediate health risk, they are unequivocally linked to the rising number of chronic illnesses in Australia, ranging from diabetes to heart disease. Genetically modified foods (GMOs) should be considered under regulation related to health and well being as well as shifts in consumer wants and needs (see more: Right to Food and Technology).

Issue: Risk and scale-appropriate regulation

Microbiological testing and auditing regimes across Australia are largely blind to scale and risk, leading to a disproportionate regulatory burden on smallholders selling via direct supply chains. From standards for egg stamps to sample sizes for pathogen testing for ready-to-eat meat products to pasteurisation requirements for milk in herdshares, Australian food safety regulation is biased towards industrial food production.

Market gardeners across the states and territories also face increasing regulation of the production and sale of fresh fruits and vegetables. The misconceptions about foodborne illness and its causes are widespread. In fact, only one percent of all food-borne outbreaks reported in Australia in 2017 were attributed to fresh produce.[461] Major outbreaks of foodborne diseases in produce up to 2022 are largely attributed to imported goods such as frozen berries and industrial farming, including baby spinach sold at Costco which was recalled due to being contaminated with hallucinogenic plant matter. AFSA has actively campaigned against the tightening of regulations on leafy vegetables, melons and berries that treat small-scale direct supply chains the same as large-scale commodity supply chains, and are disappointed to see that these changes will come into effect in 2025. We are working with state governments to minimise the negative impacts of implementation on smallholders.

Issue: Duplication of effort across regulatory systems

The three levels of government, each with legislation and agencies that mandate food safety and standards in Australia, result in a duplication of effort for small- and medium- scale food businesses.

At the state government level, the Victorian Government has a dedicated meat regulator that creates increased regulatory burden, such as conducting quarterly audits of butchery facilities, compared to an annual audit under the New South Wales Food Authority or FoodSafe Queensland. Victoria is in stark contrast to other states and territories that have integrated food regulators, which are able to view each sub-sector as part of a greater food standards system, resulting in more consolidated regulation that is often more commensurate to risk and with a lower compliance burden.

We recommend a review of the ability of state and local jurisdictions to easily and consistently interpret the food standards set at the federal level, to ensure small- and medium- scale food businesses can consistently meet the food standards, without the need for different application processes and inconsistency between state and local (e.g. Environmental Health Officer) auditing processes.  

Regulatory reform should always be conducted through a transparent and participatory approach which identifies the priority needs of small-scale farmers, and which uses measures already available in the food regulatory system to prevent outbreaks:

  1. Consult with producers with regard to the cost and administrative impact of any of government reforms;
  2. Identify and improve any current regulatory and non-regulatory measures that can be improved, rather than adding more costly and burdensome steps for producers and processors; and
  3. Provide the expected assurances to low-risk producers that there will be exemptions that apply to them should any new regulatory measures be put in place.

Any risk management measures considered should target the known source of outbreaks, namely large-scale, intensive operations and sections of the processing industry engaged in the export and import of agricultural products. Appropriate assessments of the relationship between scale, production methods, supply chain length and logistics, and risk should be a priority.

The Office of the Commissioner for Better Regulation (OCBR), including the Red Tape Unit, and similar commissioners or authorities of all States and Territories should be notified of food safety reviews to provide practical advice and support to the Government on the impacts of regulatory burden on agriculture. This can be done through the Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIS) and Legislative Impact Assessment (LIA) processes.

Issue: Livestock, food safety, and public health

We advocate for a One Health approach to food safety – an integrated, unifying approach to balance and optimise the health of people, animals and the environment. It is particularly important to prevent, predict, detect, and respond to global health threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic.[462] By adopting a One Health approach to developing scale-appropriate regulation, governments at all levels would be better equipped to address biosecurity and food safety risks from intensive livestock in particular (see also: Biodiversity is Biosecurity and Animal Welfare.)

Issue: Lack of engagement with smallholders and civil society

AFSA has long advocated for food safety regulation to consider risks in line with the scale of agricultural activities. Part of this process should be that small-scale farmers, fishers, First Peoples and civil society are involved in the development of food safety policy and regulation. Self-organised involvement of farmers’ democratic organisations in stakeholder advisory groups, steering committees and focus groups should be widely extended to ensure regulation recognises the value of smallholders in feeding local communities and reducing biosecurity risks.

Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) have been developed internationally by IFOAM as part of the organics movement as an alternative to ‘top down’ regulation, they could be adapted to fulfil scale appropriate regulation of food safety measures Across Australia. PGS are locally focused quality assurance systems. They certify producers based on active participation of stakeholders and are built on a foundation of trust, social networks and knowledge exchange.[463] (see also: Biosecurity).

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Peoples’ Policy Recommendations

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State Governments:

The Federal Government:


Case Studies

SCPA Organics - Participatory Guarantee System[468]

SCPA Organics is an organic certification process based on peer inspection and assessment which is managed by SCPA - South East Producers in Bega, NSW. It was established in 1998 to meet the need of local producers for a system that was affordable and credible. It is suitable for small growers who want to sell their produce locally. SCPA Organics is not nationally accredited and therefore not suitable for export produce. Our aim is to develop and promote organic production in the Bega Valley and adjacent areas in the South East Region.

Initially member growers/producers adhered to the de facto Australian National Standards for Organic and Bio-Dynamic Produce. In 2009 the AS6000 Australian Standard for Organic & Biodynamic Products was published. Due to strict copyright and the cost of obtaining copies of this Standard for every member, we decided to prescribe the IFOAM Standard for Organic Production and Processing as an informative guide to organic principles and practices. Where the IBS and AS6000 significantly differ and the latter standard potentially provides a higher quality of produce, then members will be informed by supplementary publications to meet the higher standard.

As per the Australian Standards, the SCPA Organics certification process takes 3 years. If the initial inspection and soil test are approved you are recorded as “Pre-Certified”. At least 12 months later a second inspection is made by a SCPA Organics member. If everything is in order at the second inspection you will be recorded as “In-Conversion” and issued with a Certificate. This phase applies for 2 years of organic practice. If all is in order after your fourth annual inspection you will become “Certified Organic”.

To assist the initial inspection an Organic Management Plan (OMP) is required to indicate your experience and intentions to manage your property/activities in accordance with the prescribed Organic Standards.

Each member must in turn inspect another member's property with full knowledge of the prescribed standards. Inspections take place in winter each year, followed by group assessment, addressing of issues and, where appropriate, certification.

This peer review system not only develops trust and education within the group, but also promotes education and knowledge sharing of the standards. Whilst this example is specific to organic certification and members performing inspections, the PGS system certainly has potential to be used for other community certification needs relating to food safety.

Prom Country Cheese (VIC)[469]

Victoria's first licenced Raw Milk Cheese facility.

Located in Moyarra - South Gippsland on the Traditional Lands of the Bunurong People and the Gunaikurnai People

Handmade in our very own cheesery from pure fresh organic milk. Our range of traditional cheeses includes natural-rinded semi-hard cheese, soft cheese, marinated and blues.

We strive to create traditional cheeses with pure and natural ingredients.

Our recipes are simple but cultures are selected and nurtured to achieve unique and complex flavours, delightful textures and the wholesomeness of real food.

We care for our land and animals by providing a diverse pasture comprised of grass, legumes, herbs and forbes as we strive for the farm to work as a whole ecosystem by supporting the native flora and fauna. Therefore, our milk is complex in flavour and nutrients as we feel that working close with the soil, pasture, cows and the environment we create a truly unique natural flavour and quality which shines through the cheese you are eating.

We provide the true 'paddock to plate' experience.

The Prom Country Cheese label was launched in 2012 to showcase the regional origin of our milk.

In March 2020 we were approved as the first commercial cheesemaker in Victoria to produce uncooked, entirely raw cheese under strict new food standards regulation.

After 20 years and two generations of cheesemaking, it was time to start the process of passing the craft on to the next generation of cheesemakers. Daniel Hales is a young organic dairy farmer with a passion for milk, cows and working with the natural farm ecosystem in a modern, regenerative approach that fosters healthy, long-lived livestock.

With the support of his wife Chelsie, and parents Carolyn and Paul, Daniel enjoys realising the potential of his premium organic milk, and secures the future of their farm down the road at Lance Creek, where the Hales family have been milking cows since 1880 (that's not a typo).

Prom Country Cheese founders, Burke & Bronwyn Brandon, will continue to remain integral to the cheesemaking operations at Moyarra over the coming years while they mentor Daniel and his new team. The product range will be unchanged, except for some exciting new products we have in the pipeline, such as a bovine raw milk cheese. We also continue to milk our sheep and are super excited that our farm is now certified organic!

Bruny Island Cheese[470]

Founded by Nick Haddow in 2003, Bruny Island Cheese Co. was started after Nick spent 10 years working with specialist cheese makers in many different countries around the world. We are cheesemakers, farmers, bakers and brewers on the traditional Country of Lunawanna-alonnah (Bruny Island), our island home.

Our products are unique and quintessentially Tasmanian. They tell the story of the place they were made, and the people who made them. Our craft is rooted in tradition and our methods are uncompromising. Our production is small and reflects the seasonality of where we live, farm and create.

Nick is a staunch traditionalist, who recognises that great cheese was made for centuries before modern technology played a role. He believes passionately in the old way of making and maturing cheese.

“The subject of raw milk and raw milk cheese has been a hot topic for as long as I have been making cheese”. Says Nick, “This debate goes to the core of the discontent much of society feels when our food gets manipulated. We feel like our autonomy is being threatened, our ability to live the life we choose, make our own decisions and be guided by our own common sense.”

Because pasteurisation kills bacteria, it is the first and foremost reason countries in the West have mandatory pasteurisation laws for all commercial dairy products. It is a safety net designed to protect the lowest common denominator. However, these laws are becoming less defensible because unsafe cheese can still be made using pasteurised milk. Raw milk cheese can be made safely. It happens every day, in dozens of countries by thousands of cheesemakers.

Raw milk from healthy animals is, fundamentally, a safe food. But it is also the perfect growth medium for pathogenic bacteria. Cheese is a fermented food. Fermentation is a natural and ancient food preservation technique which can render unsafe foods safe. The primary fermentation in cheese is the conversion of lactose (the sugar in milk) into lactic acid. This job is done by bacteria, which occur naturally in milk.

In cheesemaking, post-pasteurisation contamination is a real risk. This is because pasteurisation removes much of the good bacteria as well as all the bad. The good bacteria form a natural defence  in the milk, and if this defence mechanism is removed or compromised, then undesirable bacteria can become established and flourish quickly. This is why rapid acidification of pasteurised milk is an essential step in cheesemaking.

We were making cheese long before we had food scientists, and we are playing catch-up a bit. For the past 50 years or so we have taken a very conservative, risk-averse approach to food production – one that has shunned centuries of traditional food production and relied wholly on the point of view of science.

Fans of raw milk cheese maintain that pasteurisation destroys the natural flora in the milk which deliver so much of the character and flavour of the cheese. This is true but it is not an absolute truth. Raw milk cheese does have more character than the same cheese made on the same day from the same milk, only pasteurised.

The rich flora found in raw milk is determined by several factors: the breed, age and health of the animal, the soil, the climate, the pasture, the supplementary feed such as hay or silage, the quality of the air and water the animal consumes; to list just a few of the big ones.

Combined, these produce a milk which is true and unique to that specific animal and farm.
Terroir. Pasteurisation removes much of that special character.

In the Australian wine industry, we now place a high value on the terroir of wines. It is what sets two wines of the same variety, vintage and region apart. Yet in Australia, it is a conundrum to me that we do not value terroir in cheese. In fact, we are legally obliged to stamp it out through pasteurisation. Yet, artisan and farmhouse cheesemakers in countries like Australia rely on this point of differentiation from more commercially produced cheeses which are becoming more and more competitive on quality and price but who are not in a position to make raw milk cheese.

These regulations must be changed; not only to recognise that raw milk cheese can be made safely but also to allow for the development of real cheese with true regional character.


Animal Welfare

Context

Caring for and healing Country through the principles of agroecology extends to all life on land, as well as marine and terrestrial waters. AFSA has long been vocal about its stance against industrial livestock management and practices, writing submissions to governments on animal welfare standards and guidelines and the prevention of cruelty to animals in addition to our public outreach. In addition, we’ve voiced a strong position for the conservation, protection and restoration of fish populations and the ecosystems that sustain them for their intrinsic value in the web of life, as well as for their centrality to maintaining the food security and livelihoods of coastal communities.

​​The Animal Industries Advisory Committee in Victoria noted in 2016 that:

broader community awareness and interest in farming practices has also risen. Consumers are more vocal in their expectations around animal welfare standards and environmental impact. The community is not only interested in local developments, but also the ethical and environmental standards of production as a whole. For example, an application to expand a dairy in Gippsland attracted objections from across Australia and from as far-afield as the USA, with the primary concern being animal welfare and foreign ownership.

To enhance animal welfare in farming systems, we must shift away from commodity-based, export-focused agriculture. Climate change and the recent COVID-19 pandemic have brought to the fore the key arguments AFSA has made historically against industrial livestock where large numbers of animals kept in confined spaces are a breeding ground for emerging zoonotic diseases. The increase in public concern over animal welfare has also called into question whether animal agriculture is able to adapt to and mitigate climate change and to address cruelty. AFSA’s role in this discourse has been to raise public awareness about alternatives to industrial farming such as agroecology and regenerative agriculture, to enhance animal welfare and restore degraded agricultural land. We advocate on behalf of pastured livestock farmers, where animals are managed in ways that respect their natural instincts, and that actively enhance pasture by allowing animals to graze and disturb an area, which is then left to recover before animals are reintroduced.

This approach comes full circle to underscore the value of all life on land and in water under agroecological farming systems. Every being within an ecosystem plays a critical role in healing Country and nourishing communities through the provision of food that is grown and produced in a way that is ethical, socially-just and ecologically-sound. Australian agriculture and water policy has a long way to go to enhance animal welfare on land, as well as marine and terrestrial waters. We believe the opportunity should be taken to explore ways to protect freedom of speech and animal welfare to reflect the change in social licence in this area, and note that this is an issue that is being debated across a number of Australian jurisdictions and internationally.

Issue: Industrial livestock production is animal abuse

Animal agriculture has come under fire in the past decade, largely due to harrowing information about the treatment of intensive livestock and live exports. In addition, concerns about animal agriculture’s impact on climate change linked to rising Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGs) has prompted a rise in plant-based diets and veganism. In some cases, calls to end all animal agriculture have emerged from animal activist groups. For small-scale livestock farmers, being tarred with the same brush as industrial-scale animal agriculture fails to recognise the important role of animals in agro-ecosystems and everyone’s right to culturally-determined foods.

We assert that industrial livestock production is animal abuse, and governments must recognise that intensive livestock farming is not conducive to ensuring animal welfare.

Key issues for intensive livestock management and practice in Australia[471]

Livestock (animal)

Number produced and volume consumed each year

Animal welfare issues (intensive)

Exported to other markets (%)

Meat Chickens

650 million slaughtered

46 kg chicken meat per person

  • Bred to grow rapidly leads to deformities, morbidities
  • Breeders in cages
  • Crowded housing
  • Catching & transport

4%

Layer Hens

16 million hens

262 eggs per person

  • Cages
  • Osteoporosis
  • Handling
  • Inhumane slaughter of male chicks

Unknown

Pigs

5 million slaughtered

20 kg pork per person

  • Farrowing stalls
  • Cramped confinement & stress
  • Routine tail docking and eye teeth removal
  • Inhumane CO2 stunning

9%

Cows

1.7 million dairy cows

5,500L of milk per cow

92L per person

22.3 million beef cattle

20 kg beef per person

  • Mastitis (disease related to nutrition, hygiene & milking procedures)
  • Male bobby calves slaughtered at about one week old
  • Feedlots with no grass for ave. 50-120 days
  • Live export

Dairy: 40%

Beef and veal: 70%

Seafood[472]

166 kt seafood harvested[473]

15kg seafood per person

  • Handling
  • Stocking density
  • Antibiotic use
  • Feed ingredient sourcing
  • Poor water quality
  • Inhumane slaughter

35%[474]

False Solutions

Peoples’ Actions

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Collectivise, organise, act!

What can schools do?

What can universities do?

Peoples’ Policy Recommendations

Local Governments:

State Governments:

The Federal Government:

Case Studies

Tall Poppy Farm[481]

 

Tall Poppy Farm is a small family-run farm set on 70 acres on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country in the Macedon Ranges area in Victoria. Its grass-fed and grass-finished beef, organic soy-free pastured eggs and wine production follows different agroecological and biodynamic methods such as planned holistic grazing, soil restoration and no-till gardening. The farm represents a low-intensity pasture system in which the number of animals raised in one area is limited and few chemical inputs are required.[482] Through these measures the welfare of the animals remains a priority. Amongst the Dexter cattle, mother cows and calves stay together and weaning rings are used to minimise stress during the weaning period. Rotational grazing of the different animal species is used not just to restore soil organic matter, but to mimic the grazing of natural wild animals. This means that the enterprise does not rely on manufactured chemicals to worm the animals as the intestinal worm cycle is broken by the cattle continuously moving to fresh pasture. The housing of hens in mobile caravans with roll away nesting boxes ensures the cleanliness of the chickens' eggs and living quarters. Hens are allowed to roam freely amongst the cattle in fresh pasture bi-weekly to enhance wellbeing. Further the CSA subscription service for beef and eggs curates a face-to-face relationship between grower and eater to raise awareness about how they are safeguarding animal welfare through their commitment to ethical produce.

Sellar Farmhouse Creamery[483]

 

Together Tessa and Oliver run Sellar Farmhouse Creamery, a micro-dairy of 10 milking cows, based in Dja Dja Wurrung country, Harcourt, Victoria. To their knowledge, they operate the first licensed mobile milking parlour in the country. They process on-site fresh milk and yoghurt. Their idea to create a mobile milking site stemmed from their concerns of high animal congregations in CAFOs damaging the soil and polluting water sources. It also arose from animal welfare concerns surrounding animals being moved and held on warn tracks on route to milking, tracks which in winter become deep mud and in summer, dust. This increased the risk of udder infections and disease outbreaks which could, in turn, lead to higher mortality rate.

In contrast, Sellar Farmhouse's milking trailer follows the natural behaviour and grazing patterns of the cattle through paddocks. It also houses a calf-at-foot operation, in which after a week the calves can maintain contact with their dam whilst in the pen but cannot drink. The mothers maintain a connection with their calves whilst having the ability to go out to graze. Whilst raising healthy calves takes time (including training, separating and weaning), allowing calves to nurse from their mothers leads to healthier and more resilient future milkers. The enterprise faces some limitations, such as the compact nature of the trailer limiting milking to one cow at a time, and its top-heavy nature making driving through the paddocks slow and difficult. However, it means that the business is not attached to the land, and can adapt to changing business situations. Its shift away from commodity-based agriculture creates a small-scale yet productive agricultural system which is designed off the needs and health of its animals.

Technology

Context

Technology is seen as a solution to many things, not the least of which includes feeding the world, increasing food production, producing food in the cities, solving the problems of industrial food production in the monoculture farming of animals and vegetables. However, there is already enough food produced to feed an estimated 11 billion people, and 70 percent of this is produced by smallholders with just 30 percent of agricultural land. By contrast, industrial agriculture produces just 30 percent of the world’s food with a staggering 70 percent of land.[484] Rather than promoting technocratic false solutions to problems in the food system, we should instead: reduce waste by producing food closer to where it is consumed; promote diversity in food production, processing and distribution; decentralise and move away from chemical-intensive farming; and address governance barriers to equitable distribution of food.

High tech (false) solutions that further entrench centralised production and distribution are often touted by Global North elites, including genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to reduce the need for pesticides in plants, lab meat as a solution to growing demands for meat, hydroponics and other intensification methods growing in response to the need to feed cities. The FAO estimates that 75 percent of the world’s crop diversity has been lost, due to agribusiness establishing systems that favour genetically uniform, high-yielding varieties.[485]

However, if we live in a balanced, diverse world, with local food supply chains and resilient systems, many of these technologies are not required. Currently, many technological approaches have the ability to further disrupt our long term ecosystem reliance, and are a dangerous path to progress along.

Issue: Techno-fixes violate the precautionary principle, putting profits before planet and people

The Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Consultation (ETC Group) monitors the impact of emerging technologies and corporate strategies on biodiversity, agriculture and human rights. The ETC Group puts forward: ‘New high-risk technologies, ranging from the very small (synthetic biology, nanotechnology) to the very large (geoengineering), are rapidly developing. Their promoters promise that they hold the keys to solving climate change, world hunger, energy shortages and biodiversity loss and the precautionary principle and social and economic impacts are often ignored in the rush to deploy the latest technofix.’ There is no clearer example of this than U.S. billionaire Bill Gates, whose book ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster’ details various lucrative false solutions to global food crises under a changing climate. Not coincidentally, Gates is currently the biggest private owner of farmland in the United States, having acquired 242,00 acres of agricultural land worth almost $700 million.

The precautionary principle is an approach which derived from the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) report, led by then Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Harlem- Brundtland. The precautionary approach states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to either the public, or the environment – then the burden of proof is that ‘not harmful’ falls on those taking the action. In other words, in the absence of proof that GMOs are not harmful, the use of GMO seeds should not be used until they are proven safe. Governments should utilise policy instruments to limit GMOs, including importing from other countries. Recently, Mexico imposed strong restrictions on GMO corn, despite push back from the U.S. as a main import (see case study below).

Issue: Digital agriculture erodes the rights of smallholders

​​The push for the digitalisation of agriculture is simply another way for multinational corporations to maintain and gain further control of food and agriculture systems. The overall trend of digitalisation is towards an integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, tractors, drones, etc.) and those that control the flow of data. AFSA is part of a global movement of smallholders, Indigenous Peoples and civil society organisations actively campaigning against the digitalisation of agriculture, on the basis that techno-fixes will not work to solve the complex social and ecological crises from industrial agriculture, and will further erode the rights of smallholders.

 

On the input side, agribusiness is joining the trend of getting farmers to use their mobile phone apps to supply them with data, on the basis that they can give advice to the farmers. On the output side, big e-platform corporations can be seen buying their way into the sector and taking control of food distribution. Together, they favour the use of chemical inputs and costly machinery, as well as the production of commodities for corporate buyers, not local markets. They encourage centralisation, concentration and uniformity, and are prone to abusing their power and monopolisation. Farmers may find themselves locked into selling their farm products to just one company at a price determined by their algorithm. Farmers are sometimes contractually forbidden from repairing the equipment on their own farms.[486]

 

Food workers increasingly find their jobs replaced by machines such as robots and drones. They may be expected to work at the same pace as a robot, perhaps by wearing robotic devices, even though this has already been leading to more accidents in highly automated workplaces such as industrial meat processing facilities.[487] Automation is not only causing more risk in some workplaces, it is also a consequence of capitalism’s constant attempt to lower costs of production that adds to the rising precariousness of employment and leaves individual workers held responsible for their own ‘upskilling’. ‘It is ethically dubious to assume that it is people’s individual responsibility to assure that they remain competitive in these circumstances.’[488] Increasing automation, accompanied by rising unemployment, are further arguments for instituting a Universal (or Unconditional) Basic Income (UBI), which would bring a level of ‘societal upskilling’, meaning ‘that society as a whole bears responsibility to ensure that every person can lead a dignified life.’[489]

Issue: Technology justice

The smallholders we represent have very basic digital needs: we need connectivity and access to the internet, which is lacking in many rural areas. Farmers need smartphones so they can access information such as weather forecasts that can help decide when to cure a harvest without risk of spoiling in unanticipated rain. And we need to be able to connect to local markets to sell our produce – not through Alibaba or other profit-driven e-commerce platforms, but through open source platforms developed by not-for-profits like Open Food Network. Farmers don’t need digitalisation, they need technology justice.

Principles for technology justice assert the need to:

Just technology practices include:

Questions to assess technology parallel those that assess food sovereignty more broadly:

Issue: Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

AFSA has historically taken a strong stance against Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), alongside allies such as GeneEthics and Right to Food Coalition. GMOs and other food technologies that require manipulation of natural processes, control over seed and intensive chemical input cannot co-exist with socially-just and ecologically-sound food and agricultural systems.

Aside from the health implications of GMOs and other food technologies such as lab meat, corporate control over seed remains a global issue of social injustice for smallholders and Indigenous Peoples. Seed sovereignty asserts that control, knowledge and traditional practice around seeds remains in the hands of communities. These social and ecological considerations form the basis of our positions on GMOs. The Australian Government announced changes to Australia’s Gene Technology Regulations in 2012, to allow new GMO technologies to enter the food system without appropriate regulatory frameworks for safety assessment and food labelling[490]. A deregulated GMO environment allows for CRISPR genome editing of plants and animals, despite this new technology being rapidly developed following research discovery in 2012. There is now an emerging body of evidence to suggest that jumping on CRISPR and other GM technologies to manipulate food production processes could significantly increase the risk of cancer and other diseases given that we know very little about their long-term impacts.[491]In countries such as Mexico, governments are pushing back against the U.S. and food corporations by banning GMO crops from being grown on their land (see case study below). What we need is for governments to consider the parallels between agricultural chemicals and GMOs, to avoid the crushing impact of manipulating the food system with harmful inputs.

Issue: GMOs and AgChems - elixirs of death?

Taking a firm stance against the encroaching threat of deregulated GMOs in our food system is not about serving our own interests as producers of agroecological or organic foods. Rather, it is a stance against insidious forms of violence in our food system since the introduction of agricultural chemicals (AgChems) following World War II. Perhaps a better way of talking about the dangers of GMOs repeating the history of AgChems is not so much about manipulating nature for ‘the greater good’ to produce food for people in a changing climate. Rather, GMOs and AgChems are poisoning nature so that powerful corporations can continue exploiting people and planet for profits. Let’s consider the origin of AgChems. It was Rachel Carson who lifted the lid on the violent history of AgChems in her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, which was instrumental in the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1970s. The chapter Elixirs of Death uncovers that the AgChem industry, now a ubiquitous force in industrial food production, is ‘a child of the Second World War.’[492] 

In the course of developing agents of warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for men.

Today, there are around 1400 AgChems used in agriculture across the globe. These chemicals are referred to as pesticides broken down into five key categories: herbicides that kill invasive weeds and plants; insecticides that kill insects and arthropods; rodenticides to kill mice and other rodents; fungicides that kill fungi; and molluscicides that kill mollusks.[493] The key word we use here is kill, because these chemicals were designed by companies whose very purpose is to profit from warfare.  Chemical and pharmaceutical company I.G Farben was responsible for developing Zyklon B, the nerve agent used to kill Holocaust victims in concentration camps during World War II. When the war ended, these companies turned their attention to using chemicals of warfare to kill nature, by marketing nerve agents to farmers as a modern breakthrough in pest-control, rather than the agents of genocide. Most people alive today will recount the horrific images of Vietnamese civilians–including children–being sprayed by 19 million gallons of chemical herbicide Agent Orange by the US military from 1962-1971. Agent Orange was produced by Dow and Monsanto, two of the largest chemical corporations controlling the AgChem market in 2023. In recent years, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved Dow’s new Agent Orange GMOs designed to grow herbicide-resistant corn and soybeans, a decision which mobilised 400,000 farmers to campaign against chemicals of warfare being used in agriculture.[494] 

We must acknowledge the parallels between AgChems and emerging GMO technologies being rooted in violence against nature, including we, the people. Humans are a part of nature and we must consider the long-term implications of AgChems and GMOs on human health.

Issue: Ultra-processed foods (UPFs)

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are characterised as formulations of mostly cheap industrial sources of energy, nutrients and additives, resulting from a series of industrial processes.[495] They include soft drinks, snacks, reconstituted meat products, and prepared frozen dishes, but also bio-fortified foods, supplements and ultra-processed plant-based meats.[496] They are made to be convenient (durable and ready to consume), attractive (hyper palatable) and highly profitable (low cost ingredients). However this technical advancement has transformed the food system around key health, economic, political and environmental crises. The low-quality and industrial composition of UPFs makes them high in saturated fats, depleted in dietary fibre, various micronutrients and other bioactive compounds. As UPFs dominate the food supply of high, middle and lower-income countries alike,[497] this has resulted in a global pattern of unhealthy dietary nutrient profiles and diet-related non-communicable disease.

The transnational corporations (TNCs) producing and marketing UPFs (such as Nestle, Pepsico, Unilever & Kellogg’s) are oligopolistic, often displacing authentic established food systems and cultures.[498] The transnational networks of cheap sourcing of ingredients (such as oils, sugars and starches) needed for UPFs transforms national agricultural production towards monocultural crop production, making the livelihoods of small-scale farmers more vulnerable.[499]

These TNCs also yield significant political power. With annual turnovers the size of middle-ranked national economies,[500] they make it difficult for governments in lower and middle income countries to enact fiscal and regulatory policies. Further, the manufacturing and distribution chains of UPFs often depend on long international transport routes that contribute to depletion of non-renewable energy.[501] Animal-based UPF products depend on intensive breeding of animals which leads to greater spread of pathogens across agricultural production and which depends on the deforestation of forests for soybeans and corn-based feed production.[502] (see Right to Food & Food Safety)

False Solutions

Peoples’ Actions

What can I do?

What can my community do?

Collectivise, organise, act!

What can schools do?

What can universities do?