On food security and alternative food networks

On food security and alternative food networks: understanding and performing food security in the context of urban bias Jane Dixon & Carol Richards

Agriculture and Human Values Journal of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society ISSN 0889-048X Agric Hum Values DOI 10.1007/s10460-015-9630-y

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Author's personal copy Agric Hum Values DOI 10.1007/s10460-015-9630-y

On food security and alternative food networks: understanding and performing food security in the context of urban bias Jane Dixon1 • Carol Richards2

Accepted: 9 July 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

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 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 nutritionsensitive, 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 & Jane Dixon [email protected] Carol Richards [email protected] 1

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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 School of Management, Business School, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St, Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia

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. Keywords Urban–rural dynamics Food regimes Australian alternative food networks Australian food security Abbreviations ACOSS Australian Council of Social Services AFNs Alternative food networks AFSA Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance CAP Country Areas Programme CHD Coronary heart disease FAO Food and Agriculture Organisation GDP Gross domestic product GNP Gross national product LDCs Less developed countries NDCs Now Developed Countries UBT Urban Bias Theory WHO World Health Organisation

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

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Author's personal copy J. Dixon, C. Richards

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 Australia.1 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. 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 sociotechnical 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, 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.

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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 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 subsystems 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 security dynamics within the Australian context becomes manifest. This particular set of conditions also suggests that following European economic geography, economic anthropology and sociology toward hybridity may not offer the best approach to understanding the power dynamics underpinning Australia’s agri-food system.

Author's personal copy On food security and alternative food networks: understanding and performing food security in…

Using Urban Bias Theory, the main intention of this paper is to re-spatialize the institutional dynamics that lie behind Australia’s food security, and to consider the contribution that alternative food networks make to food security within these institutional settings. While we largely dismiss the current contribution of AFNs to food security, except possibly as they support sustainable livelihoods for a small number of alternative food producers, we argue that they play an important role in producing a more food literate and politically engaged ‘food citizen’. Importantly, civil society engagement with alternative food networks provides a pathway to understanding and challenging the free market model as well as residua list welfare state models (food banks) in favour of a rightsbased, food sovereignty approach. Of all the constituent parts of the alternative food system, we argue that Australia’s national food sovereignty movement has a pivotal role to play because of its advocacy for citizen-led food systems that must be fair for all—for producers, eaters, animals and the environment. To begin the paper, the demand and supply aspects of food security are outlined. This is followed by an overview of the unfolding of state support for agriculture over the twentieth century in Australia. To explain the changing nature of that support, we introduce the Urban Bias chain of argument and its consolidation through neoliberal agricultural policy. We then describe the contradictory role being played by Australian urban citizen-consumers who support both AFNs and foods delivered through the Second and Third Food Regimes. This leads us to ask whether alternative food networks maintain or even reproduce an ‘urban bias’, and hence food insecurity for some subpopulations, or whether support from alternative food networks and the food sovereignty movement holds the key to a rural agriculture and population revival and the foundations for a more sustainable national food system. The notion of ‘fair returns to farmers’ plays a pivotal role in Urban Bias Theory as it does in Food Regimes Theory, hence this paper considers how within-nation food system re-spatialization responds to the unevenness of global–local dynamics. Through emphasising the socio-spatial particularities of national processes of agri-food system transformations, Urban Bias Theory enriches Food Regimes Theory.

Meeting Australia’s food security needs As footnote 1 intimates, food security results from the production and consumption of a wide array of foods capable of providing the full range of health promoting nutrients. At the household level, food security is the outcome of the cultural economy of demand—including

food’s affordability and acceptability—and supply-side dynamics, including food’s availability and accessibility.

Food demand and income related food insecurity Like many other governments until recently, Australian governments have adopted a narrow view of food insecurity as a problem of hunger, or of people going without a meal, due to (the temporary) inability to afford food. Using this type of measure, the most frequently cited publication provides a figure of 5 per cent of the population as food insecure, although this is based on a national survey that is now 20 years old (Burns 2004). Using the broader understanding of dietary diversity, 13 per cent of respondents to a small nationally representative sample said they often or sometimes could not afford to buy balanced meals and eight per cent said that food had often or sometimes run out (Lockie and Pietsch 2012). As poverty is highly correlated with household food insecurity, it is appropriate to consider this dimension; and in 2010, the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) estimated that close to 13 per cent of the population, including 17.3 % of children, lived in households below the most austere ‘‘poverty line’’ indicator (ACOSS 2012). Thirty-seven per cent of people on social security payments such as job seekers allowance, disability pension and parenting payments live below the poverty line, as do 62 % of age pension recipients. These groups are at a higher risk of food insecurity, including both hunger and nutrient deficiencies. The spatial variations in the risk of food insecurity are significant. In the most disadvantaged areas of Western Sydney—a region which is home to 2 million people— more than one in five people experienced food insecurity in the mid 2000s (Nolan et al. 2006). In that study, food insecurity was associated with the cost of food, capacity to save, the presence of children in the household, housing tenure and health status. Nutritionally inferior diets become more pronounced with area remoteness, and they contribute to the higher rates of rural deaths due to coronary heart disease (CHD) (diet is but one contributor to CHD, with alcohol, smoking and inadequate physical activity being relevant, and each of these health risks is elevated in rural areas) (AIHW 2008). When over-nutrition and micro-nutrient deficiencies are included in the definition of food insecurity—as in current WHO definitions—three quarters of the adult population does not eat according to nutrition guidelines (ABS 2012a). Again poverty plays a role: there is a clear socio-economic gradient in obesity which is possibly linked to the fact that processed foods can be cheaper and more calorie-rich than their fresh equivalents. For low-income families, food may be the only flexible item in household accounting—

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whereas there is no flexibility on costs such as rent/mortgage and utility bills (ACOSS 2012). Australia’s food supply: export-oriented agriculture rather than nutrition-sensitive agriculture The concept of nutrition-sensitive agriculture is relatively new, arising as a response to global data showing how widespread diet-related non-communicable diseases have become (UN System High Level Task Force on Global Food Security 2012). While hunger remains an entrenched problem, the recognition that more than one billion people have sufficient calories but insufficient nutrients has raised questions regarding the links between the health of populations and the health of agriculture. Nutrition-sensitive agriculture has become a proxy for food supplies that contain less sugar, salt, animal-saturated and other transfats, and higher amounts of fruit, vegetables and pulses (Hawkesworth et al. 2010). This, however, is not the direction in which the Australian food supply is heading in large part because it is producing high-value protein and bulk carbohydrates for export markets. By undertaking a socio-historical study of the current food system, we are better able to understand the within-nation geo-political tensions underpinning the food system, including the relative importance of the industrial and alternative food subsystems. Australia’s pattern of white settlement two and a quarter centuries ago followed the siting of natural harbours for shipping ports, fresh water and fertile land. In the early 1800s, Australia’s largest city, Sydney, was governed by a British Empire representative with a passion for establishing agriculture in and around the city. Until pastoralism arrived in the middle nineteenth century, Australian cities and large towns located up to 50 km inland from the coast were fed through minimally processed and preserved foods imported from Britain, augmented by localized urban agriculture. As the country transitioned from a penal colony to a self-governing settlement, and in the ensuing 150 years, a good proportion of the major cities populations were fed from local vegetables, fruit, nuts, eggs, poultry and dairy (Mason and Knowd 2010; Wilkinson 2011). The opening up of Australia’s interior to sheep, wheat and cattle by British pastoralists and first generation ‘freesettler’ descendants of the British, employing Aboriginal Australian stockmen, laid the foundations for the First Food Regime (Friedmann and McMichael 1989) lasting roughly from the 1880s to 1930s. This saw the production of, and trade in, bulk agricultural commodities destined mainly for the colonial power. Because of its relative success in commodity production based on a combination of freehold titles, extensive agricultural holdings, benign weather patterns and technological ingenuity in machinery

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and animal breeding, Australia entered the first part of the twentieth century as a settler state breadbasket (McMichael 1984; Lawrence 1987). Early on, a spacialized agri-food system became institutionalized with large rural export oriented enterprises on the one hand and tens of thousands of small producer units supplying domestic markets on the other. Market gardens, small dairy farms, sheep farms and orchards ringed the six capital cities: they were single or multi-family owner-operator businesses, which supplied inner city wholesale and retail markets, independent green-grocers and butchers. As populations moved out of inner cities from the 1930s onwards, suburbanising the land through quarter acre blocks and road networks, household gardens were used to provide eggs, fruit and vegetables with some estimates suggesting that one quarter to one-third of fresh food emanated from this non-market source (Dixon and Isaacs 2013a). By the 1970s, urban-produced poultry and eggs were the earliest fresh commodities to become corporatized and supermarketized establishing the template for supermarket supply chain behaviours (Dixon 2002). With changing labour markets and the attendant appreciation of the convenience of shop bought foods, the extent of home production has diminished markedly since the 1960s (Banwell et al. 2012). With the exception of pigmeat, seafood and processed fruit and vegetables, Australia continues to consider itself to be food self-sufficient (DAFF 2012). Today, 134,000 agricultural businesses, occupying 52 per cent of the land mass (ABS 2012b) supply 23 million Australians with fresh foods—especially grain-based, dairy and meat-based products. These agricultural businesses also generate substantial export earnings; and in 2010–2011, more than twothirds of wheat, 70 percent of sugar and more than half of the barley crop was exported (ABS 2012b). In this regard, Australia produces more food than its population can eat— a measure that is assumed to equate to national food security but, as highlighted earlier, nutrition security is better assured by the alleviation of poverty and the availability of dietary diversity than sheer production metrics. The stable delivery of dietary diversity requires a multisectoral food producing sector, but this is shrinking given the dependence on imports in key areas. Australia is more heavily reliant on food imports than at any time since the early twentieth century and its exporters are facing unprecedented competition from lower cost agricultural producing nations (Lawrence et al. 2012). On a range of indicators—other than yields of bulk commodities such as wheat, sugar and beef—Australia’s once vibrant (in terms of technological adaption) and economically significant agricultural sector looks less than robust. In the next section, we explain why this might be the case.


Introducing the Urban Bias to explain the institutional biases underpinning Australia’s agricultural policy During the 1980s and 1990s, an important debate got underway internationally within development economics circles regarding the existence of national government policies which favoured urban populations over rural populations; with the favourable urban treatment being made possible through the national income receipts generated by rural agricultural activity and farmer subsidized cheap food. The theory of ‘Urban Bias’, first expounded by Michael Lipton (1977), was based on a multi-country comparison of data from 63 less developed countries (LDCs) and nine now developed countries (NDCs). In this work, urban bias referred to ‘‘the tendency of public authorities and private persons to allocate, and their disposition to justify, for large urban areas, proportions of developmental or welfare-generating resources in excess of any reasonable norm of either efficiency or well-being’’ (Lipton 1977, p. 43). Lipton arrived at this conclusion by applying an equation to measure urban–rural disparity, calculated by the ratio of non-agricultural to agricultural income per person. While varying considerably, the LDCs in his study had a workforce with an average of 70 % being engaged primarily in agriculture, producing 40 % of GNP with 20–25 % of ‘capital stock’. He claimed that these results indicated considerable economic efficiency when compared to urban contributions to GNP, which were based on a much higher percentage of capital stock. Moreover, he argued that the within-country urban–rural disparity results coupled with comparisons between NDCs and LDCs showed that governments not only ignored sectoral efficiencies when re-distributing revenues, but also that they dispensed with principles of fairness through taxing the agricultural output of highly efficient poorer farmers while subsidising possibly less efficient farmers to assist them to compete more internationally. As Bates, a World Bank economist and a supporter of Lipton’s theory explained, ‘we must understand the politics of the profoundly paradoxical transformation of agriculture’s location in the political economy of nations, as these nations develop: its transformation from an embattled majority that is taxed into a minority powerful enough to be subsidised …’ (Bates 1993, p. 221). From the outset, criticisms were levelled at the Urban Bias Theory on the basis of the adequacy of the data (derived from countries with relatively poor data records), the formula used and the difficulty of maintaining an urban–rural distinction when there were clear instances of shared political interests between urban and rural elites. In response, Lipton (1984) reframed his theory as a testable

hypothesis, and agreed that more in-depth, historical process case studies were required. In answering his critics, Lipton (1984; 1993) highlighted that his was a class analysis rather than an area analysis, and that his hypothesis was not negated by arguments that rural elites colluded with urban elites or that the gross numbers of poor resided in urban and not rural areas. He continued to argue that LDCs are ‘‘dominated, at the cost of both efficiency and equity, by an urban group that under-allocates resources to, extracts surpluses from, and turns prices against a rural group’’ (Lipton 1984, p. 158). Essentially, a range of mechanisms operationalized Urban Bias and they were typically deployed in a sequential order. The first involved higher taxes on agricultural producers to generate revenues in the name of nation-building. The second was a rural and urban bias as it involved subsidizing producers to better compete internationally and to produce foods for domestic consumption at low prices in order to support a more diverse economy. Large exporters gained, while small domestically oriented producers suffered. The third mechanism, referred to as ‘price twists’, came about through state sponsored currency manipulations with the overvaluing of currency—meaning that the price of imported goods upon which to build industrial sectors and foster consumer spending was lower. This had the effect of driving up the price of agricultural exports, and operated like the second strategy to make farming a less viable source of income. Of all the component parts of the Urban Bias hypothesis that have attracted controversy, the price twist argument is possibly number one (Bates 1993; Timmer 1993; also see other contributors to the Journal of Development Studies 1993, vol. 29(4)). These strategies combined to generally mean the transfer of agricultural and other rural industry-based revenues to support broader national developments, especially urban manufacturing and service sectors including higher level urban social services, or what was called ‘distributional bias’. While there is no space to provide a detailed analysis of how each of these mechanisms operated in Australia, we briefly address two of them below. Urban Bias as the introduction of agricultural subsidies to build competitive, export-oriented agriculture and to deliver low food prices Early on, Australia did exemplify the rural bias for urban development aspect of UB theory. From Federation in 1901 until the 1970s, there was an assumption that the whole of Australia flourished when agricultural conditions (both climatic and economic) were going well, and that agriculture should be well supported by governments to perform the revenue raising task the nation had come to expect of it.

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This support came in numerous forms including: price supports, taxation concessions, subsidization and rural extension services (Lawrence 1987). There were also costly investments in infrastructures to service agriculture—railways, irrigation schemes, telecommunications—and the provision of government services to rural areas, like police stations and post offices, equivalent to those in more populated areas (Brett 2011). Equally however, farmers subsidized manufacturing industries for decades through currency valuation fluctuations and the government imposition of tariffs for machinery, chemicals and equipment to protect the steel and car industries (Lawrence 1987). In this way, agricultural and hence rural policy was hostage to monetary and trade policy and the rise of manufacturing, just as the Urban Bias hypothesis would suggest. However, conditions for both agricultural producers and consumers were abruptly redefined in the 1980s when the Australian Labor Party embraced open commodity markets through the deregulation of tariffs, removal of import quotas, the floating of the dollar against world currencies, and introduced a labour-industry accord which saw wages and social benefits become tied to productivity gains, rather than pegged to changing household needs as had been the case for the previous 70 years (Brett 2011). Instead of government-regulated commodity boards setting prices, producers of all sizes were expected to compete on world and domestic markets with periodic assistance (drought programs, ease of credit programs, sectoral restructuring) being available only as required when economic and environmental conditions faltered. Today, only 2.5 per cent of Australians work in agriculture, almost half the number of 20 years ago (ABS 2012b). Furthermore, not even Australia’s foremost export-oriented farmers—those in broadacre farming (encompassing beef, sheep, grain crops) and dairy—can be assured of a future in agriculture according to a very recent government agency assessment (ABARES 2014). In analysing the performance of broadacre and dairy farms over the last 12 years, and noting significant financial performance variability within the sectors as well as the spatial variability in achieving good results due mainly to weather conditions, the overall assessment is sobering. Across the two export-oriented sectors commodity prices decreased, farm indebtedness increased, farm costs were significantly higher, and farm equity was eroded through a decrease in farm values. Average debt across the broadacre and dairy sectors has doubled in a decade and stood at $546,000 per farm in 2009–2010 (ABARES 2014, p. 42); and almost half of smaller beef and sheep farms derived more than half their household cash income off-farm (ABARES 2014, p. 51). In these conditions, the market signal for farmers is to ‘get big or get out’, which to date, has seen the creation of fewer, larger, farms, with large numbers of small- to medium-scale farmers exiting the sector.

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For historian Judith Brett (2011), the post 1970s chain of events is best explained by the rise of neoliberal policies which have had the effect of making the smallest farmers compete in the same markets as corporate farmers. Higher levels of enmeshment of medium and large-scale farmers within global supply chains along with multi-lateral trade agreements mean that national governments have less authority over their agricultural sectors than in the past (Kay 2009). In this situation, the prosperity of urban and rural populations alike is bound up with the globalization, corporatization and financialization of agri-food systems, which begs the question as to the on-going relevance of the Urban Bias Theory. Kay (2009) argues that what has been called Urban Bias should be reframed as ‘landlord bias’, or the ongoing exploitation of labour by capital; and in the case of agriculture, urban bias simply refers to the unequal access to land, labour and resources: a key mechanism within Food Regime Theory. This form of inequity is currently on view in Australia with the major banks forcing the evictions of indebted farmers, including those who until a few years ago were turning profits (Neales 2014). Urban bias as distributional bias: investments in services and infrastructure Urban Bias proponents and critics agree on one point: that modernization typically proceeds through the distribution of national receipts away from rural areas towards urban areas in order to support industrialization and urban-centric service sectors. However, opinions differ as to whether this transfer is iniquitous or not, given that rural people benefit too from overall improvements to GNP including through infrastructure investments to get their produce to market. By 1993, Lipton was arguing that it was easier for structures of power to intervene on non-price bias, including infrastructures and services. Nevertheless, he argued that rural areas in low-income nations were not likely to receive their fair share of capital flows (Lipton 1993, pp. 251–252). At this point, he expanded the indicators relevant to measuring ‘distributional bias’ or non-price bias to include: urban–rural wage ratios, doctor allocation, primary school coverage, public investment and credit availability. Possibly because of the historically tight alignment of rural spaces, peoples and activities with food production and the ever diminishing worth of Australia’s primary agricultural activities to GDP (now only 2 % compared with mining at 7 %), rural areas are receiving less political attention than at any time since Federation and as a result less investment from national and state governments than in the past (Brett 2011; various chapters in Pritchard and McManus 2000). In Lipton’s terms, this urban–rural disparity in public investment represents a ‘distributional’ bias that is iniquitous given that a relatively small number of


highly efficient (in classical economic terms, input: output ratios) enterprises are contributing a not insignificant, albeit dwindling, proportion of GDP. On other outcome indicators as nominated by Lipton, the rural to urban disparities in health status and educational attainment due to a lack of appropriate services are prominent in Australia. Australia’s Institute of Health and Welfare provides regular updates on the health risks and outcomes of rural as compared to non-rural people. The poor health status is not confined to Indigenous and remote Australians, whose access to appropriate and timely health services are manifestly inadequate. Higher rural mortality rates are due to a raft of preventable and treatable conditions: coronary heart disease, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and cancers. The farming population has disproportionately high cardio-vascular disease risks and psychological distress, and male-over-20 suicide rates (Gregory et al. 2015). Here the distributional bias is stark when considering that, ‘‘the documented poorer health outcomes are in part the result of limited access to services’’ (Gregory et al. 2015, p. 208), which extends from hospitals to mental health, maternity and domestic violence services. The lack of public financing flowing to rural health at one level represents a saving to the public purse, but the productivity losses from premature mortality and prolonged and multiple disabilities of rural people is missing from the policy debate. Support for the UB hypothesis is further bolstered when considering lower levels of investment in public schooling. Figures for the numbers and proportions of schools in rural and remote areas are misleading, with more than half of all the nation’s schools located outside the cities. However, they are much smaller and often combine age groups and educational levels in the one classroom. The educational outcomes of their students are far inferior, with numerous factors being provided including socio-economic status, the economic decline of the areas in which they are sited and the matter of rurality itself, being a proxy indicator of multi-factorial disadvantage (Roberts 2015). To address the poorer outcomes, the Country Areas Programme (CAP) was introduced in the mid 1970s with the express purpose of redressing the ‘rural deficit’. In 2009, a program that focuses on low socio-economic groups, regardless of spatial distribution, replaced the CAP. The use of urban-oriented measures of success, and ignoring what is special about rural aspirations, employment and other opportunities, reaffirms the marginal status of rural communities. In a context of inferior health and educational status, the twin issues of unemployability and ‘welfare dependency’ arise. While the overall numbers of rural people have been declining, those who do remain are disproportionately older, sicker and underemployed due either to a lack of jobs or a poor fit between available work and qualifications or experience. As a result, a disproportionate number of

rural people depend on government provided social welfare monies (age and disability pensions, single parent benefits, unemployment and retraining benefits). Whether this particular wealth transfer from urban to rural areas offsets rural to urban transfers, in terms of the provision of cheap foods, environmental services and rural research and development benefits, has not been calculated for Australia to our knowledge. What is known is that the Australian welfare state was designed nearly 100 years ago to equalize opportunities for urban and rural Australians, and this included financing specially targeted programs to help maintain, if not increase, population levels outside the major cities and towns (Brett 2011). The assumption that rural areas could earn their own share of public resources was eroded in the early 1970s, and the government intervened with a Rural Reconstruction Scheme and agricultural sector structural adjustments schemes (Weller 2015, p. 153), forms of which continue today. In the main, these policies aim to encourage farmers to leave the land, selling to larger farms, and then to retrain to enter the labour market in other sectors. However, as Weller (2015) points out, while there have been some notable programs that acknowledge the special spatial disadvantages experienced by rural Australians, some programs that apply national rules (for example, jobseeking behaviour) simply discriminate against rural people, exacerbating their social disadvantage. The relatively recent series of policies that favour urban populations over rural ones reflects development economics orthodoxy that economic growth everywhere, regardless of economic history or environmental conditions, is based on a ‘natural’ coupling between rural outmigration and urban manufacturing and service sector jobs (but see Kay 2009 for a more nuanced explanation of the process). In this regard, there are strong resonances between Food Regimes theorizing and the Urban Bias hypothesis. Both posit the centrality of a cheap food regime to national development, or put another way, that the maintenance of low farm prices is the price to pay for industrialization policies. The perspectives share a view that rural populations and environments are represented as a source of cheap labour and products, which in turn links the externalization of ecological relations to commoditization and the demise of peasant holdings and family farms (Dixon and McMichael, in press).

Alternative food networks in Australia In response to the perceived failure of the agro-industrial model of food production and associated ills, such as poor returns to farmers, food related health issues, corporate domination, environmental impacts and food insecurity,

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civil society actors have sought to transform food systems. ‘Alternative Food Networks’ (AFNs) has been coined as a term to describe citizen-driven food systems (Goodman et al. 2013; Renting et al. 2003) that operate outside of the corporate-industrial food regime (McMichael 2013; Burch et al. 2013). As well as an emphasis on quality, organic or low chemical input whole foods, key characteristics of AFNs include short supply chains, localized production, and the production of public and environment goods such as environmental sustainability, local economic development, closer relationships between producers and consumers, and renewed connections between eaters and the origins and provenance of food. AFNs encompass a suite of practices around food production, consumption and exchange. As identified in other papers in this symposium, these include new distribution relationships between rural and peri-urban producers and urban ‘eaters’ via mechanisms such as community supported agriculture, farmers markets, ‘alternative’ or organic grocery retail (often badged as health stores) and, more recently, online organic food shopping. Urban agriculture is a key activity under the umbrella of AFNs and includes community gardens, school kitchen gardens, city farms, ‘permablitzing’ (community-led, backyard food garden makeovers), small-scale market gardens, food swaps, backyard/balcony/rooftop gardening, farmers’ markets, ‘guerrilla gardening’ and collective gardening in privatelyowned backyards (Burton et al. 2013; Edwards 2011; Lyons et al. 2013; Richards et al. 2011). Gleaning, foraging and freeganism2 also respond to food security and the inequalities embedded in the Third Food Regime. A new breed of reflexive consumers have taken up dumpster diving to glean from the excesses of industrial, corporate food system, whilst the application of digital technologies to identify, map, harvest and distribute the spoils from neglected fruit provide access to food outside of the formal economy. Given Australia’s recent history as a rurally-based agricultural producer, ‘urban agriculture’ (food grown and distributed within and around the city, as distinct from pastoral and feedlot operations) has become associated with ‘alternative food networks’ (linking rural/peri-urban/ urban producers with ‘eaters’). Whilst there is an emerging, yet tangible trend toward urban agriculture globally, its uptake in developed countries has been mostly by educated, inner-city elites (Jarosz 2008; see Woods 2012). Although AFNs are closely linked to community aspirations of domestically procured food security as well as

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For example, see Sharing Abundance in Melbourne, Australia: https://transitionbrunswick.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/sharing-abun dance-in-moreland/.

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‘access’ to credence foods not readily available through the supermarket supply chains, in terms of food sovereignty they are largely driven by volunteer networks in the inner cities or high amenity peri-urban areas (as described by Holmes 2006). As a result, AFNs cannot be viewed as an accomplished challenge to the corporate food regime, but rather a work in progress with two key, interrelated biases yet to be overcome: class and geography. Whilst many attempts have been made to mainstream AFNs and make local, low-chemical, whole foods accessible to a broader community, access to foodstuffs via AFNs has been a key sticking point largely due to price, or the perceptions of price. Products from labour rather than chemical/technology intensive systems tend to carry higher prices, particularly when costs, such as environmental care and fair prices for growers, are internalized. A number of businesses and organizations operating within the AFN model have sought to reduce the price of quality, local food by buying in bulk, reducing the number of intermediaries and passing on savings to eaters, whilst also ensuring that suppliers are fairly recompensed. In theory, this should mean the reach of AFNs, particularly buyers’ groups and box schemes could be extended to lower-income communities, yet there is little evidence of this occurring. Instead, many low-income households who are in need of emergency food relief tend to seek assistance from a growing sub-system of the alternative food network, namely charities and food rescue agencies (accounting for 2 million Australians in 2013) (SecondBite 2012). AFNs are urban-centric to the extent that urban consumer demand underpins their existence, but do their benefits extend to rural communities and contribute positively to rural development in the absence of effective state intervention into the declining terms of trade in Australian agriculture? The lack of empirical data on the scale of AFNs and their contribution to rural development has been noted elsewhere (Renting et al. 2003), and data for Australia are not available beyond rapid growth in numbers of farmers markets and schemes that put consumers in touch with farmers. Arguably, the key benefits for rural communities are from reconfigurations, or at least a new imaginary, regarding a shift in urban dispositions toward fairer food systems. To a large extent, this alternative ‘market’ has already been captured by the major supermarket chains, which sell fair trade, organic and local products (Richards et al. 2011; Seyfang 2008). Whilst the products may encapsulate ‘alternative’ credence claims, the embedded rural–urban economic power relations remain the same. This is especially so while the supermarket-driven cheap food regime continues to be welcomed by many households including those who support AFNs, even though rural and urban citizens alike find disquieting how supermarkets treat Australian farmers


(Dixon and Isaacs 2013a, b). As in England and Wales, it seems, ‘highly conventional’ purchasing habits are being challenged by ‘overlapping loyalties and convictions’ (Winter 2003, p. 31). The ‘defensive localism’ being pursued through supporting AFNs (Winter 2003) is being countered by the daily imperatives of urban wage labourers managing their temporal and financial budgets. Still, the supermarketization of daily living has not dissuaded a number of small-scale niche producers, situated in the peri-urban belt or within driveable distance to urban farmers markets, from responding to new consumer demands for quality products. This shift to ‘quality’ production has to a degree challenged the ‘get big or get out’ mantra of the agro-industrial model, and provided sustainable rural livelihoods for some small-scale producers (see Andree´ et al. 2010). Similarly, box schemes such as food connect in Queensland, Australia, have provided farmers with an alternative to dealing with major supermarket chains, who have long been accused of squeezing farmers on price due to their immense market power (Richards et al. 2012). Although this is the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in terms of sustainable rural economies, it demonstrates what is possible. The non-tradeable outcomes of these new urban–rural relationships include trust building, new connections between disparate rural–urban populations and a new appreciation by urban dwellers of the value of the fertile, peri-urban belt, which is under threat from urban encroachment around Australia’s cities. The spaces encapsulate Australia’s ‘multifunctional landscape’, offering tradeable goods, ecosystem services and rural amenity in the form of cultural landscapes and agritourism. The multifunctional, peri-urban landscape lends itself well to AFNs but reflects only a fraction of Australia’s food producing land, the majority of which is enrolled into commodity production for export markets (Bjørkhaug and Richards 2008; Dibden et al. 2009). It is questionable whether much of this agricultural land could ever take advantage of the increased demand for ‘alternatives’ given their entrenchment in the agro-industrial paradigm, reliance on chemical inputs, their distance from urban markets and the relatively low population of Australia. In essence, Australia has a two-tier system of food production: periurban production of perishable goods for domestic, urban populations and rural/remote, large scale, undifferentiated commodity production (such as beef, wheat, sheep) for export markets. One major push toward urban recognition of the plight of Australian farmers has come from the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA). Unlike the food sovereignty movements in the developing nations, developed nation food sovereignty movements have tended to be instigated by an urban, educated middle class, however, links with the

alternative farming sector tend to be strong.3 Much focus has been on the rights of eaters, but efforts have also been made to enrol farmers into the movement with mixed success. In framing a response to Australia’s National Food Plan, and devising The People’s Food Plan (AFSA 2012), AFSA highlighted the contradictions of a food system based on a cheap food supply and diminishing farmer income streams. AFNs and the food sovereignty movement are gaining traction in Australia, with widening support and increasing media exposure, but the entrenchment of the agro-industrial food regime, backed by finance capital, corporate interests and a government fixated on ‘neoliberal efficiencies’ has a long way to go to make an impact on food security for low income communities and sustainable livelihoods for Australian farmers (Dixon and Isaacs 2013b; Kettings et al. 2009). Herein lies the tension in attempts to relocalize and democratize the dominant food system via AFNs: Urban Bias is deeply entrenched and reinforced through reductivist market logic of neoliberal governance. This means that the cheap food regime will continue to reign with strong institutional support, despite clear indications that this is a race to the bottom. Desires to produce a fair food system from the ground up butts against the institutional power of the Third Food Regime, combined in Australia’s case with a particularly urban bias in public policies.

Discussion: dispensing with the urban bias to achieve food security This paper re-analyses AFNs in terms of development economic theories and questions their practical contribution to food security across the Australian population due to their relatively small scale and their socio-cultural dynamics (including appeal to more affluent groups). At the same time, the national food sovereignty movement inspired by an international movement that places farmers and producers at the centre of the food system appears to be crucial to genuine food security. In spite of the challenge being posed by fair food system proponents, successive Australian governments continue with an urban bias approach to public policy. The privileging of urban population prosperity and well-being over rural population prosperity, involves a policy mix of cheap food and higher levels of urban services, amenities and income generation possibilities. This approach in turn consolidates a spiral of rural decay and a commensurate 3

Anecdotal evidence/Pers Comm: co-author Carol Richards served on the committee of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance from 2011–2014, and was Vice-President 2013–2014.

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lack of capacity to produce sufficient quantities of dietary diversity. Nevertheless, in the absence of vibrant urban agricultural and alternative food sub-systems, it is premature from a food security perspective to declare ‘the rural’, the industrial and the commodified redundant in Australia. We highlight that just as the Global South and Global North distinction remains relevant when discussing global food system formations, so does the distinction between urban and rural communities within nations where a ‘tyranny of distance’ operates not only geographically, but culturally and politically. The Australian experience simultaneously is unique and reflects the influence of a pervasive development orthodoxy that prevails in many countries: agrarian development should give way to industrialization as soon as famines and sustained hunger are no longer being experienced. This orthodoxy is riddled with contradictions: de-agrarianisation represents national economic progress and social mobility for rural citizens as they enter urban labour markets; but, given global competitiveness driven by low wages, cheap food is required and this leads to chronic poverty for many producers, who then exit farming. At this point, the urban bias argument resonates with a food regimes perspective; but, Urban Bias Theory enriches that perspective by reminding agrifood scholars of the socio-cultural-spatial impulses behind national policy. It alerts food sovereignty adherents to the importance of domestic as well as international arena activism. If ‘agriculture is to work harder for nutrition’ to paraphrase the UK Government Office for Science in The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and choices for global sustainability (2011), then it has to fulfil three functions: (1) production of diverse and locally desirable food at affordable prices; in so doing, (2) make use of technologies, institutions and infrastructure to improve economic access for all through generating employment on and off the farm; and, (3) address issues of social access and social exclusion. Translating this argument to Australia would require that agricultural and non-agricultural activities of mainstream farmers become more highly valued by governments, business and civil society (Cribb 2010; Stokes and Howden 2010). As it currently stands, due to an absence of decent livelihoods, farmers are leaving the land in large numbers and are not being replaced by a younger population of farmers, leading to inferior rural population incomes, health and education outcomes.

Conclusion The theory or hypothesis of Urban Bias in development captured a rural–urban dynamic prevailing in low and middle-income countries from the 1950s to 1990s; and we

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would argue that its relevance extends to high-income agricultural producer countries in terms of the rural to urban transfers of resources. We argue that Urban Bias was not simply ahead of its time in terms of noting the iniquitous impact of the widespread adoption of particular views of economic development irrespective of socio-cultural and environmental conditions. The foregrounding of rural–urban relations remains relevant to the achievement of durable food security for all, not least because of the tenuous situation faced by small and medium-sized food producers who sit at the heart of that food security (FAO 2014b). In relation to the Australian situation, domestic food security will not be addressed through the proliferation of alternative food networks coupled with an extension of urban agriculture on the peri-urban fringe of cities. The institutional will is not present, nor is the scale of production or an enabling, widespread culinary culture based on alternative-market conventions. Simultaneously, supermarket and corporate food processor commodity chain engagements remain essential to albeit dwindling Australian farmer livelihoods and rural community well-being. This last tension or contradiction is not simply the logical outcome of global supply chains, but arises in part from decades of national policies in agriculture, rural affairs and economics favouring urban populations. This paper has argued that chief among the urban population oriented policies is support for: • •

•

•

Cheap food delivered largely through self-regulating supermarket and food processor supply chains An export-oriented commodity sector providing livelihoods for large producers, leaving smaller and niche producers to supply more competitive and hence less secure supermarket and food processor chains. The export revenues go into consolidated revenue, which finance the public services upon which all Australians depend for their own livelihood prospects (education, health care, employment opportunities). These services operate disproportionately in urban areas, where the overwhelming numbers of people reside Rural assistance programs that are both sporadic and dwarfed by the investments in urban infrastructure and services, justified on the basis of critical mass and efficiency. These policies have arisen from an inherent urban bias in how national development was, and continues to be, understood. The resulting distributional bias in services, resources and privilege not only reproduces rural disadvantage but undermines the establishment of a nutrition-sensitive agriculture system. As a consequence, this particular policy orientation generates inferior food security outcomes.

Author's personal copy On food security and alternative food networks: understanding and performing food security in… Acknowledgments In addition to the anonymous reviewers we would like to thank Michelle Young and Geoff Lawrence for suggestions on improving this paper.

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Jane Dixon Ph.D., is Senior Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University and Honorary Research Fellow, The Centre for Food Policy, City University London. Her research takes place at the intersection of agri-food sociology and public health. Currently she is studying the role of various forms of social protection for food producers and food system sustainability. Dr. Carol Richards is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Management, Business School, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her areas of research interest include the sociology of agriculture and food, food security, rural and environmental sociology, neoliberalism and governance and new social movements. She has published on the topics of sustainable natural resource management, food security and supermarket power and is currently researching the fossil fuel global divestment movement.