Monday, 06 July 2009 09:32
The amount of food we produce in Victoria will continue to be challenged by water shortages, competition for land around the cities, increasing electricity, fuel and fertiliser costs. We will also be increasingly accountable for the environmental impacts of our food as carbon and water prices become commonplace. But how will this impact on Victorian menu planning and will it affect our ability to access a healthy diet?
These are some of the questions that will be explored in a new research discovery project funded through VicHealth and undertaken by the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (at the University of Melbourne), Deakin University and CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems with Victorian Government partners including the Department of Planning and Community Development.
Project manager Kirsten Larsen, based at the University of Melbourne, says that there is increasing vulnerability and uncertainty in our global, and local, food systems and that we need to start planning for secure and affordable food access to healthy foods. “Climate change is our biggest known unknown – we know it will continue to impact enormously on food production systems, but we are really not able to predict when, where or how much.”
In a similar vein, we know that economic instability will impact on what food moves around the world, how much our farmers get paid, and how much of our community is struggling to afford the food they need, but we cannot predict or control these changes.
In the face of this rapid change and increasing uncertainty, there are no simple solutions. As we weigh up these risks, there are many different opinions on how policy and investment decisions should be made to underpin resilient, sustainable and healthy food supplies in the future – at the same time as needing to rapidly reduce the greenhouse emissions associated with our food.
This project will develop a range of scenarios to explore how our access to a healthy diet is affected by different combinations of: unpredictable and uncontrollable external conditions; and our chosen pathways for developing sustainable and secure food supplies.
The scenarios will be used to explore policy and development pathways that might best underpin future food security, come what may!