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If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9630-y 1 ON FOOD SECURITY AND ALTERNATIVE FOOD NETWORKS: Understanding and performing food security in the context of urban bias Jane Dixon and Carol Richards Associate Professor Jane Dixon National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health Research School of Population Health ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment The Australian National University 62 Mills Road Acton ACT 2601 Australia T: +61 2 6125 5623 F: +61 2 6125 0740 E: [email protected] Dr Carol Richards School of Management, Business School Queensland University of Technology 2 George St, Brisbane, QLD 4000 Australia T: +61 7 3138 5313 E: [email protected] Abstract This paper offers one explanation for the institutional basis of food insecurity in Australia, and argues that while alternative food networks and the food sovereignty movement perform a valuable function in building forms of social solidarity between urban consumers and rural producers, they currently make only a minor contribution to Australia’s food and nutrition security. The paper begins by identifying two key drivers of food security: household incomes (on the demand side) and nutrition-sensitive, ‘fair food’ agriculture (on the supply 2 side). We focus on this second driver and argue that healthy populations require an agricultural sector that delivers dietary diversity via a fair and sustainable food system. In order to understand why nutrition-sensitive, fair food agriculture is not flourishing in Australia we introduce the development economics theory of Urban Bias. According to this theory, governments support capital intensive rather than labour intensive agriculture in order to deliver cheap food alongside the transfer of public revenues gained from rural agriculture to urban infrastructure, where the majority of the voting public resides. We chart the unfolding of the Urban Bias across the twentieth century and its consolidation through neo- liberal orthodoxy, and argue that agricultural policies do little to sustain, let alone revitalize, rural and regional Australia. We conclude that by observing food system dynamics through a re-spatialized lens, Urban Bias theory is valuable in highlighting rural-urban socio-economic and political economy tensions, particularly regarding food system sustainability. It also sheds light on the cultural economy tensions for alternative food networks as they move beyond niche markets to simultaneously support urban food security and sustainable rural livelihoods. Introducing a new perspective on food security Since at least the 1970s in Australia the city has had the upper hand and the country has been pushed aside. In fact, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the word “country” had all but disappeared from Australia’s political vocabulary as a word for the settled countryside, replaced by “regional” for major non-metropolitan centres and “rural” for areas of sparse population, although regional often does for both (Brett 2011, pp. 3-4). This paper explores the contribution that alternative food networks (AFNs) can make to food and nutrition security in Australia1. In particular, it examines the political, economic and cultural conditions under which Australia’s food producers operate. It describes the different tensions for corporatized farmers, supplying large food processors and supermarkets but receiving low prices, and ‘alternative’ small-scale farmers, who supply short and less industrial-scale food chains. Urban citizen-consumers are positioned as a central political actor in the argument. 1 Food and nutrition security refers to more than caloric security, and encompasses the full range of macro and micro nutrients. The best source for vitamins and minerals is a diet rich in diverse food types. 3 The political economy of corporatized-industrialized and alternative farming, the latter challenging the former, is captured by the Food Regimes perspective, an approach familiar to many agri-food scholars (Burch et al. 2013; Friedmann and McMichael 1989; McMichael 2013). Adopting a Food Regimes approach requires the undertaking of a socio-historical framing of national policies as they mediate producer-consumer relations, shape labour relations and land tenure, and respond to the evolving locus of power within the global food system. To date, three international food regimes have been identified: an early twentieth century era of extensive agriculture producing bulk commodities linked to geo-political expansion (First Food Regime); a mid-twentieth century industrial, processed food era animated by food surpluses and socio-technical system developments (Second Food Regime); and, a late twentieth century period of global corporate and supermarketized supply chains highly sensitized to, and manipulative of, citizen-consumer concerns regarding the environment, nutrition, animal welfare and farmer incomes (Third Food Regime) (see papers in Campbell and Dixon 2009). However, given the uneven playing out of these dynamics, there has been growing interest in applying perspectives that illuminate even more strongly the particularities of background socio-cultural and socio-environmental conditions at national and sub-national levels. These realms of social action have been elevated in significance through a set of interrelated theories – Conventions Theory, Actor Network Theory and Socio-technical Systems Theory – which variously argue that discursive and material practices anchor government food and agricultural policies, firm level practices and civil society dispositions towards what becomes normalized, alternativized or marginalized (Goodman et al. 2013; Isaacs et al. 2010; Law 2002). Within a context of providing a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the mechanisms by which global social forces are modulated by national conditions to produce food systems, we introduce the Urban Bias Theory (UBT) from mainstream development economics. At first glance this choice appears inappropriate: over the last 35 years it has been applied to only developing and newly developed nations; and, it has been subject to trenchant critique from within the development economy field. In a recent revisiting of the theory’s relevance to upper middle income countries, UBT was considered valuable in a range of development settings, especially for the way it identifies spatial and socio-ecological ontological biases 4 that authorize specific national policy positions, producer-consumer dispositions and capital- state relations (Dixon and McMichael in press). In adopting an Urban Bias framing, this paper goes against a strong trend within agrifood studies to dispense with urban-rural binaries, to dissolve spatial boundaries more generally, and instead to consider networked consumer-producer engagements and city region food systems (FAO 2014a; Marsden 2012; Kneafsey et al. 2008). These approaches are useful in Europe and South America where there is arguably more fluidity across rural-urban and producer-consumer binaries given the important place of peasant histories within modern national identities. To some degree, they have explanatory power in the Australian setting too with a long-standing peri-urban agricultural presence and the more contemporary flourishing of non-corporate food provisioning approaches connecting urban consumers with rural producers. However, these sub-systems are not key to food security for the majority of Australians. Furthermore, the diminished viability of key domestic agri-food sectors – horticulture, fish, pigmeat, and processed dairy – combined with the on-going population exodus from rural areas, which have provided the main sites and labour forces for these sectors – suggests that the overwhelmingly rural basis of Australia’s food security is undergoing a fundamental transition. Moreover, with 89% of Australia’s population living in urban areas and 65% in capital cities (Hugo in press) putting pressure on peri-urban agriculture (Mason and Knowd 2010), and a heightened sense of socio-political division between urban and rural areas (Brett 2011), the importance of re-examining food