Foodprint Melbourne: Building the Resilience of Melbourne’s Food System (Short)
Channel: The Royal Society of Victoria
Date: 23/09/2021

We tend to think of Melbourne and other Australian cities as places that are food secure; nationally, we produce enough food to support 60,000,000 people, more than twice our population, in service of our role as a major exporter of primary goods and food products. Supermarket shelves are usually filled with food, all year around. But in the last 18 months we’ve seen images of sparsely-occupied shelves, crops being dug back into their fields and students queueing for food vouchers. The compounding crises of bushfire and pandemic have revealed some of the cracks in our food supply system, flaws that make our population vulnerable to scarcity.

Dr Rachel Carey, a Lecturer in Food Systems @UniversityofMelbourne and leader of the Foodprint Melbourne project, here explores what we need to do to strengthen the resilience of Melbourne’s food system to future shocks and stresses, particularly those related to climate change and pandemic, seeking a more nuanced conversation about matching up available resources with the healthy, sustainable diets we want our population to be maintaining.

We can leverage the lessons from the pandemic to transform the way we manage our food system, through strengthening local and regional food supply chains; sustaining the productivity of fertile land on the urban fringe; building efficient, circular food economies to minimise waste; promoting resilient, sustainable production systems adapted to a changing climate, such as regenerative or agri-ecological approaches; building livelihoods through addressing insecure employment, low wages and poor working conditions in the food industry; and redesigning systems of food relief to ensure equitable, dignified access to healthy, sustainable, culturally-appropriate food during times of system stress.

Produced with the support of the Inspiring Victoria Program. Rachel's full presentation is also available at https://youtu.be/pxaGhEL0Eow.