Food security is another of those things that demands our
concentration and conversation.
Solutions to a collision of circumstances appear scarce, but
answer them we must and subsequently we need to gather and talk how we ensure
our food supplies.
Nourishment in all its forms, particularly food, is
elementary to survival.
Writing in the introduction to “Rebuilding the Foodshed: How
to create local, sustainable, and secure food systems”, the director of the
Post Carbon Initiative, Asher Miller, said: “In the twenty-first century, we
face a set of interconnected economic, energy and environmental crises that
require all the courage, creativity and cooperation we can muster”.
That trio of values is to be found in community; not the
community flippantly referred to in contemporary times, rather it is that place
with a deeper sense of belonging, of ownership, an understanding that your
survival is intertwined with where you live, how it works and how it connects
with your food supply.
Being somewhat Shepparton-centric, then what is happening
here is simply a more expanded version of what is happening to other towns in
the area, our sprawling neighbourhoods are eroding what was rich and productive
farmland, and the infrastructure inherent to their function.
Standing on the cusp of an era in which oil-rich
industrialized farming will be disrupted and ultimately disabled, we need to be
preserving those food-productive pieces of land that are either within towns or
nearby.
It is short-sighted in the extreme to take rich food
producing land, pave it over and use it for housing which accommodates only a
few people per hectare and is wholly dependent upon oil.
Rather than spreading endlessly toward the horizon, we
should be working to consolidate our towns, take a lesson from an oil-starved
Cuba of late last century, and aim to secure what food we can from within town
boundaries using community gardens, any open space, back and front yards and
even town parks as places to grow food to feed ourselves.
Using the Australian developed processes of permaculture,
the Cubans were quickly able to produce 70 per cent of their vegetables within
the boundaries of their towns and cities.
Most of the food on your dinner-table tonight is there
because of oil, including, incidentally, the table itself, and the sooner we
can figure out how to feed ourselves without such an unhealthy reliance on this
vanishing fossil energy, the better.
Colliding circumstances, among them our changing climate,
water scarcity, a burgeoning population, and the loss of the earth’s topsoil
and so arable areas, insist that we act to secure our food supply.
That is “what” we need to do and so we should gather and
figure our “how” we do it.
