Have you ever thought about where your food comes from and what happens if the food supply chain is interrupted during a disaster or pandemic?
Griffith University’s Kimberley Reis works with community groups, businesses, and local governments to find ways for communities to access more resilient food sources.
Dr Reis’ research is about longevity in choices in accessing food and contingency planning for food supply chains within disaster risk management. Contingency planning is about having options. She wants to ensure people have choices and back up plans when it comes to food sources.
She said the COVID-19 pandemic and associated shortages of labour for fruit and vegetable harvests, led to increases in the cost of food and that had amplified the need for resilience in our food supply chain.
“We want people to share responsibility for how they access their food, so that when we have tough times people have options,” Dr Reis said.
“This is about creating choices for people when we have interruptions in supermarket supplies. We want people to be able to have additional avenues for accessing their food. This empowers people to have choices around where they access their food so that they’re not just relying on one point of source with the food supply chain.”
Dr Reis wants to change the way people think about food, shifting their sole dependency on the long food supply chain and the wide range of actors between consumers and producers within the national or international scale to work with those in the shorter food supply chain where we can access food locally, regionally or within their State.
She said solutions include consumers buying from local farmers’ markets, where they establish a direct relation with farmers, buying into a box system where subscriptions help farmers to plan crop growing, or getting involved in a local agricultural project such as a community or school garden or even an urban farm.
“Then of course, there’s your backyard gardening. So, what we’re looking at in the range of short food supply chain actors is fewer mediators between the producer and the consumer. And indeed, we’re moving towards consumers as co-producers within the local food system.”
Another short food supply chain initiative is the ‘share economy’ where locally grown food is swapped or given away. This enables those who are experiencing financial hardship to access fresh food.
Dr Reis said these approaches give consumers more choice and the ability to make informed choices about the food they eat and its origins, while also deciding whom to support when buying food.
For example, significant food wastage occurs because some fruit and vegetables are what people consider to be ‘ugly’ food or disfigured food, although it has the same nutritional value, but it does not find its way onto supermarket shelves. This food is of lower economic value and may be dumped in landfill which is a considerable economic loss to farmers.
Dr Reis said people who purchase ugly or disfigured foods outside of the supermarket system know that they are buying local which means supporting local communities and businesses.
“The ‘Buy Local’ initiative is actually very important to people. We value keeping our dollars within our communities and the supermarkets can tap into that by purchasing and showcasing that imperfect food and showing their commitment to supporting local communities and local businesses,” she said.
Food resilience is an important part of disaster risk management, spanning from those communities that suffer from chronic food disadvantage to the broader community that experience temporary spikes in food shortage due to supply interruptions.
With the increasing severity and frequency of severe weather events, there is a need to share responsibility for food resilience and there are many ways of doing so.
Dr Reis said it was problematic to continue to rely primarily on food distribution points such as Rocklea in Brisbane which is in a flood plain and subject to major periodic disruption.
“This reminds people of just how vulnerable we can be. If we put all our eggs in one basket in terms of that longer supply chain model,” she said.
Dr Reis works with Councils and leads two key projects about food resilience. The first, with Cairns Regional Council and its Disaster Management Unit, was about embedding local food contingency planning. Along with the Council, she developed a shared local food access model to enable disaster management practitioners to work with local food contingency planning. Building the community’s capacities to access local food supplies is now a strategic action within Council’s Climate Change Strategy 2030.
“One of the basic premises that we understand as disaster risk management researchers and practitioners is that a one size solutions does not fit all circumstances. It’s another fantastic enabler and in disaster management we move to place-based approaches and work with the solutions that fit that context,” she said.
The second project is with Logan City Council looking at sustainability and food with the current urban growth corridor which was previously a productive agricultural area.
“The model in the olden days was to grow food close to where you live. To manage our population growth, we are building houses on this previously productive agricultural land, on the flood plains with rich alluvial soils that used to be used for agriculture,” she said.
She is a member of an industry reference group with Logan City Council advising on the new planning scheme to be released in 2025, ensuring that urban design and planning embeds and enables local food systems where people work, live and breathe.
“We need to energise local communities and businesses to uptake various expressions of local food systems, whether it’s vertical gardens, box systems, or urban agriculture of all sorts, it doesn’t have to be broad field agriculture. It’s amazing what you can produce in a one acre or even half an acre lot for that matter”.
“I take my hat off to Logan City Council for being open to intentionally and explicitly including within their Urban Design Framework that we need to incentivize local food access and reduce our reliance on external supplies,” she said.
Dr Kimberley Reis won the ‘Research Excellence Award 2022’ from the Office of the Inspector-General Emergency Management, Queensland Government for her research in local food resilience during severe weather and pandemic events.
You can read and see more about Dr Reis’ projects here:
Call to action to local councils and others for planning for local food contingencies:
Cairns Regional Council, Local Food Resilience Hub:
https://www.cairns.qld.gov.au/community-environment/sustainability/local-food-resilience-hub
Planning for food security in advanced capitalist nations:
