How Foodprint Melbourne is shaping an equitable, resilient and sustainable food system
The pandemic exposed just how fragile Melbourne’s food systems really are. Supermarket shelves were stripped bare and many people turned to foodbanks for help. To ensure we are better prepared next time, Foodprint Melbourne has launched a toolkit to support communities and organisations across the state plan for more resilient food systems. To mark its release, Nourished Neighbourhoods lead convenor, Dheepa Jeyapalan, sits down with the Foodprint Melbourne team – Rachel Carey, Maureen Murphy and Tara Behen – to discuss their groundbreaking research and bold vision for a regenerative city.
Picture this: Melbourne in 2050, home to 7 million people, concrete sprawling further into what was once fertile farmlands. Will we still be able to bite into a locally-grown apple or toss fresh lettuce into our salads?
Foodprint Melbourne at Melbourne University has been doing groundbreaking food systems work for years, wrestling with this exact question. In 2015, their research shone a spotlight on the diminishing food bowl around Melbourne, examining how we can access nourishing food with shorter supply chains, amid shocks and stressors. Their findings were both encouraging and alarming: Melbourne's city-fringe farmland grew enough food to meet 41% of the Greater Melbourne population's overall food needs. But with urban development eating away at this precious agricultural land, they posed the critical question: If we want to be able to eat local fruit and vegetables in 2050, how can we plan to make it happen?
The pandemic made their advocacy work feel urgently relevant. The collective anxiety of empty supermarket shelves highlighted just how fragile our food system really is, and the importance of moving beyond emergency food relief and our reliance on the supermarket duopoly, to systemically address underlying vulnerabilities. As our city’s population grows toward over 7 million and urban sprawl continues to devour farming communities, these questions have only become more pressing.
The Foodprint team are leaders in guiding Victoria and Australia's food systems sector, spearheading responses to multiple food security inquiries and creating pathways for community organisations to meaningfully engage in policy development. In their fourth phase of work funded by the Lord Mayor's Charitable Foundation, they've been developing the Victorian Food Resilience Planning Project. Its final output is a practical toolkit designed to provide evidence and guidance for policymakers and stakeholders on building real resilience within Victoria's food system against the shocks and stresses we know are coming. The project team has worked closely with policymakers and community stakeholders to co-develop a comprehensive “How To” guide for food resilience planning.
Dheepa: You've been champions of local and resilient food systems for over a decade now. How has that conversation shifted with policymakers, the public and others in the food system sector?
Rachel (Foodprint Melbourne): When we started investigating Melbourne’s food system ten years ago, there was little understanding that fresh food supplies in Australia were vulnerable or that fresh food production around Melbourne could be important to the food security of a growing population in the context of climate change. We’ve long had a narrative in Australia that we’re a food secure country because we produce and export a lot of food.
Now there is greater awareness of the impacts of climate shocks on food systems, and of the importance of city foodbowls to supplies of fresh food, particularly fruit and vegetables. There is action to strengthen protection for some areas of farmland around Melbourne, although more still needs to be done. But there is greater understanding of the issues. There is also more action by local governments, civil society groups and communities to strengthen the resilience of local food systems.
More than ten years ago, the City of Melbourne introduced the first city food policy in Australia that aimed to promote a resilient, sustainable, healthy and equitable food system. Now, many local governments in Victoria have similar policies, and groups in Victoria’s food movement have been doing amazing work to build regional food supply chains. There is good reason for optimism about the progress that can be made over the next ten years.
Dheepa: Ten years is a long time to be pushing this boulder uphill. What have been your biggest "a-ha moments" or breakthroughs been?
Rachel: Ten years is a long time – but real lasting change takes time. It requires broad collaboration across sectors and with policymakers. It's messy and complex. Some of the big breakthroughs have come during crises and shocks to the system, when people’s understanding of the challenge changes and space can open up for rapid shifts.
The COVID-19 pandemic was one of those moments. It shone a spotlight on some of the vulnerabilities in our food system. It was the first time many people had experienced empty supermarket shelves and seen up close the impacts of major disruption on food supply chains. It showed that when shocks hit our food system, the people most affected are those who are already experiencing or at risk of food insecurity, particularly people on low incomes.
The pandemic made food insecurity in Australia more visible. It created space in public and policy debates to discuss the impacts of shocks on food systems and how we can build resilience. We’ve had two parliamentary inquiries in Victoria into food security and securing food supplies since the COVID-19 pandemic, which have led to some excellent recommendations to create a more resilient, equitable, healthy and sustainable food system for the state. By following through on some of those recommendations, we can transform our food system in ways that will make us better prepared to face any future shock or stress.
Dheepa: Tell us more about how this toolkit has come about and the process to get it here?
Maureen (Foodprint Melbourne): We started working on this toolkit more than two years ago. It emerged from the findings of a previous phase of the Foodprint Melbourne project, where the need for food resilience planning was well and truly established. We could see that climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and geopolitical shifts – like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – were disrupting food systems and leading to rising food prices and food insecurity. The question was how do we plan for more resilient food systems? So we set out to develop a toolkit that would help people to do this.
We reviewed existing evidence in this relatively new area of food resilience planning, and we looked at how government policies influence the resilience of food systems and food security. We interviewed people in government, industry and community groups to understand how they think about the resilience of food systems and the types of support they need to take action to build resilience. We ran a series of co-design workshops, where we collaborated with the people who would use this toolkit – particularly policy makers and people in the community sector – to co-develop tools and guidance to support them in the work of making food systems more resilient. The toolkit has progressed from early ideas and rough sketches to the tools and processes that we’re launching as part of our new toolkit.
Dheepa: When you imagine this toolkit being used – in council chambers, community meetings, planning offices – what does success look like to you?
Tara (Foodprint Melbourne): The key aim of the toolkit is to support people to actually do food resilience planning. We have purposefully designed the toolkit as an inviting and accessible platform to support people at all stages of their food system journey, whether people are completely new to this work or are already building more equitable and resilient food systems. It’s also been designed to be used by people from different sectors, including community and government. Success may look different depending on who is using the toolkit and in what context.
Our research has shown us that many people are still learning about what food resilience planning is. They may need support to make the case for this work to their colleagues or managers, or they may want to understand how they could take action to build food system resilience. If the toolkit can support them in getting started with this work, then that would be a success. If it can elevate the importance of planning more equitable and resilient food systems to people in the many sectors that can take action – such as urban planning, community building or climate adaptation – then this would also be a success.
Dheepa: There are so many of us working in food, lying awake at night thinking whether our food system can handle the next pandemic or climate disaster. For people like us, who are deeply concerned about this issue, how should we be getting involved in this work?
Rachel (Foodprint Melbourne): One of the best things we can do is build cross-sector networks. Networks and alliances that are built on trusted relationships across food systems enable us to respond quickly in the event of a shock. They also facilitate a shared understanding of the issues.
Another key thing is to put diversity at the centre of our networks and equity at the heart of our solutions. When shocks hit, people already at risk of food insecurity are most affected. People with lived experience of food insecurity need to be at the centre of dignified solutions. A ‘food with dignity’ approach, grounded in the human right to food, is a core part of our toolkit, and we hope that it can play a part in driving change towards an equitable, resilient, healthy and sustainable Victorian food system.
Want to learn more? Head here to explore the Foodprint toolkit.
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