Pillars of Food Security

These issues are at the heart of the Food Security issue - long term ecological production, equitably available supply and the affordability of food.  Food is a human right.

Drawn from a cross section of their communities, groups across Australia have formed to work on aspects of food security such as Landcare, Community Gardens and Transition Towns. One group, the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance has specifically draw up the outline of an integrated food security policy for government and individual action.

Columban - Unjust Genes - Part VII  

Alliance members come from diverse backgrounds - health workers, farmers, town planners, social justice workers, organic gardeners and others. Following wide consultation of stakeholders in local meetings, their ‘integrated food security policy’ lists requirements to guard and enhance food security in the Sydney basin but their policies have wider application. Building on the main pillars of food security, the Alliance asks the three levels of government to formulate Food Policies and names issues to be included:

•    Protect in perpetuity prime agricultural land and the agricultural-water supply
•    Make policy compliance for agricultural production and supply rest on the principle of ecologically sustainable development
•    Use a precautionary approach to health in approving new food production and processing technologies such as genetic engineering and irradiation
•    Generously fund research that supports ecologically sustainable production and organic systems
•    Ensure fair economic returns to farmers in spite of fickle weather and trade deals
•    Support local and regional food systems to enhance local economies and local food access
•    Protect individual food security as a human right regardless of income
•    Use tax and other mechanisms to subsidise healthy food for the chronically ill
•    Make healthy food preparation and eating a part of all education programs
•    Legislate that all media give ongoing community access to free information that helps people to make healthy food choices.

Columban Mission is all but alone in its Australian Catholic contribution to debate on genetically modified (GM) crops and Food Security. The precautionary principle is at the heart of its logic and its method has been to foster public debate on the dangers of GM, alerting the public to the false hopes it offers. To this end, Columban Mission produced a DVD called ‘Unjust Genes’ (ref. Section on GM). Along with Jesuit scholars Columban Mission has battled with the Pontifical Academy of Science which has been lobbied by International seed and chemical companies to get Vatican endorsement for GM crops. They do this on the pretext of providing a way to feed the hungry of the world, a perversion of charity.

The intrinsic value of Biodiversity to Food Security has also been a campaign focus of Columban Mission along with several Catholic spirituality and ‘education for the environment’ centres. As St Thomas Aquinas wrote, preserving God-given life in nature’s diversity helps reveal the plentitude of God. It is not only a justice issue about guarding diversity as an insurance policy to guarantee the human food supply, preserving biodiversity is a spiritual issue about how we perceive and relate to the God of all Life (ref. Section on Biodiversity). Both the justice and spiritual aspects raise practical challenges about preserving and appreciating wildlife habitat, the danger inherent in industrial style agriculture and the virtue of organic style agriculture.

A bundle of climate-related environmental crises is beginning to affect Food Security in Australia – the overuse of water by many irrigation systems; the decline in average rainfall in southern Australia; the rising price and peaking supply of oil for fuels and fertilisers, the loss of food producing land to biofuel production, urban sprawl, rising population and pressures to find a home for environmental refugees.

Hopeful signs of a national groundswell have emerged as diverse movements seek alternative pathways to Food Security. It is a blessing that they offer an opportunity for dialogue between Gospel living and the aims of these movements. Life is the central word.

It is of note that the church has been most alive when it engaged with the realities of people’s lives be they educational, medical or other social needs. This was the hope the Vatican II document ‘Church in the Modern World’ No. 10 when it asked Catholics to shed the light of faith on the pressing issues of the day. Movements to combat obesity, to develop local growers markets or develop sustainable towns are all signs of hope and offer opportunities for cooperative dialogue about what is life-giving.

A sinister twist is added by the PR machine of industrialised agriculture and the biotech companies when they aim to undermine steady state food security by pedalling lies. They make more money from crises than stability. Resistance is being organized by some food wise people, wise like the proverbial Scriptural serpent as they promote local food fairs and celebrity chefs. Others promote the lifestyle advantages of becoming local food producers in city and country and creating local intensive employment opportunities (ref. Trade Section and foreign workers).

Research into an alternative style for agriculture has been accepted by the United Nations FAO as offering the best solutions to securing food for the poor of the world. These alternatives take the best of traditional organic practices and add scientific techniques to enhance them.  

In the past, the so-called Green Revolution was the first step beyond traditional organic farming. For some decades it did wonders for the developing world but it could not be sustained long term. This is also true of food production in Australia. The Green Revolution made constant demands for more water ignoring the fact that water is a limited supply. It also demanded the use of ever-increasing and more expensive fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides. Its practice of mono-cropping led to more mono-pests. Sadly, it also opened agriculture to control by the large chemical-seed companies and controllers of the food-chain who in turn are being taken over by international biotech conglomerates.

Food Security poses many challenges not the least of which is the way Catholic social justice and spiritual teachings are challenged to grow and become more subtle.

Compiled by Rev. Charles Rue
Coordinator of Columban Justice Peace and Integrity of Creation Australia

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