Page updated:
Friday, 7 September 2007

FOOD systems...

Let's eat local food

Bottled water might be a basic sort of food, however it is an essential one and it is the sort of local product you would expect to find in a liberal, environment and food-conscious town like Byron Bay. It is also big business, and consumers are happy to pay for it twice what they pay for a litre of petrol.

One of the best places to find local food in Byron Bay is the Thursday morning farmers market.

Where to start? Byron Bay's organic food stores - the number in town suggests consumers are well aware of environmental and food issues - seemed to be likely places to find locally bottled water. Entering one shop, part of a North Coast chain established in the 1970s, I found a range of waters including one product that was set up for prominent display. A good way to promote the local product, I thought. But... no. This water had been imported all the way from Fiji. Feeling a little perplexed why fresh water would have been transported a third of the way across the Pacific when there is an abundance of the stuff running free in the hills, I walked down the road to another store specialising in organics and what would once have been called 'health foods'. Like the first shop I visited, this one had bottled water from interstate, but no local product.

So, though I knew my chances were small, I crossed the road to Woolworth's supermarket. They had bottled water aplenty, shelves of the stuff in a selection of different size containers, brands and prices. Was this a case of supermarkets living up to their claim of consumer choice? Maybe... but so did the two organic food shops I visited earlier. In the bewildering choice that Woolies offer me was bottled water from New Zealand and different brands from interstate. But... no local product.

By this time I started to realise that there may be no local water in the shops because there is no local bottler of the stuff. If this is true then it is reasonable to ask why. The region, after all, has fresh, clean water in quantity.

Retailers cannot be blamed for failing to stock local produce if it does not exist or if it is in short supply. It was later in Sydney that the manager of a northern beaches food cooperative shed light on the subject when she was asked about stocking local produce. Her co-op stocked some, however, "We sell fruit and vegetables from interstate and from New Zealand too", she explained. "We can't source enough organically grown produce from the region".

Much of Australia's organically-grown farm produce goes overseas and this leads to supporters criticising the industry although farmers might rely on exports for their financial viability. While they support a national organics industry, critics say that exports make the organics industry no different to the conventional food business. Even when it is not exported, local product may be traded and shipped to distant parts of the country, just as is the so-called fresh food sold by supermarkets. It is this trade in like-product, its export from the region where it is grown and the import of similar product from elsewhere, that critics of the food system see as illogical and a waste of increasingly expensive transport fuel. What is more, they say, the trade increases the volume of heavy truck transport on our highways and that, in Byron Bay, is currently a political issue with the proposed upgrading of the Pacific Highway.

'Food miles' - a measure of the distance food is transported from producer to consumer - is a hot topic among local economic and food advocates. They point out that vegetables, fruit and culinary herbs transported vast distances should not qualify as 'fresh food' even though they may have been moved in refrigerated vehicles. However, their main criticism is that the trade in like foodstuffs, whether international or within countries, contributes to excessive fuel consumption, road congestion, pollution and road trauma.

This may be true for goods moved in large trucks, the prime carriers of foods in Australia and the European Union. It might not hold for foods transported by sea, however. Although sea transport does contribute to food miles, the volume that shipping is capable of moving reduces the per-kilogram consumption of fuel. That is the conclusion of a UK study - Farm Costs and Food Miles: An assessment of the full cost of the UK weekly food basket (www.elsevier.com/locate/foodpol).

Distortion of the local market?

The trade in like foodstuffs is international, not just between states and regions within Australia. Commentators, like Byron Bay's Helena Norberg-Hodge, say it is made possible by subsidies provided by government. These so distort local food markets that imported product can be offered in the shops cheaper than local product, despite the distance it had been transported and the handling it had undergone. Ms Norberg-Hodge cites the example where, in Byron Bay, oranges imported from California were sold at a lower cost than Australian oranges. This is of little benefit to the region's orchardists.

Selling the region's bananas - Byron Bay Farmers Market

If subsidies provide biased support to the international and interstate trade in like food product, do they have a justifiable place in a market economy? Why should shops that want to sell imported product and consumers who choose to buy it be the beneficiaries of subsidies and not pay its full price, inclusive of transport and handling? That, at least, would remove some of the market distortion that discourages local and regional producers and would allow them to compete locally on the basis of the true cost of production and distribution.

Even where there is no local product - and that would apply to a considerable range of foodstuffs - the removal of subsidies such as those on road transport would ensure that purchasers of the foods pay the full price. That would simply be an extension to the food industry of the 'user-pays' principle so favoured by market-oriented government. With subsidies, all taxpayers foot the bill even though they might buy local.

Though they are often blamed as the main culprit, it is not only the supermarket chains that do little to support local growers and food processors. Visit any organic food store and you find plenty of product from interstate or overseas, lines such as Italian pasta, cheese and yogurt from Victoria and South Australia, milk from Tasmania on sale in Sydney organic shops, fruit and vegetables from other states, even bottled water from Fiji.

When you see the big, white semi-trailers pull into the supermarket dock to unload foods grown by distant farmers and packaged by distant processors, you are seeing the importation of product in which economic value has been added in distant regions and the monetary value - what people pay for the products - exported to distant shareholders. Supermarkets, say the critics, might provide lowly-paid and low-skilled jobs, but their real economic purpose is to serve shareholders, not local communities or local growers. The money that townspeople spend in the supermarket is immediately exported to other places.

The value of local

Local food is becoming an issue. Evidence for this is seen in the rapid growth of the Slow Food movement (www.slowfood.com) which has spread from its Italian homeland to the rest of the world in just a few years. There are now active branches of Slow Foods in most Australian capitals and in some regional centres like Byron Bay. Although Slow Foods does not run a political campaign around food, their championing of local produce and local cuisine educates the public in the values of eating the local product.

Further evidence that food issues are gaining a hold on the popular imagination comes from Queensland Labor backbencher, Andrew McNamara. He was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald (2-3 April 2005) as telling the Queensland Parliament in February that year that a peaking of global oil production could happen sooner rather than later and that this will present substantial challenges to our society and economy. Adapting to the challenges will require " ...the localisation of food production and business, local rail lines and fishing fleets". He says self-contained communities in which people live close to work, services, schools and farms will be essential.

MacNamara's comments are based on the thesis of Peak Oil which postulates that, as oil production peaks within the next 20 years, industrial economies will have little time to adjust to declining supply. The idea cannot be written off simply as that of doomsayers; it has support from within the oil industry itself. If it is right, then countries like Australia, where oil is critical to the entire economy and society, had better start thinking fast - especially because truck transport is so important to the movement of foods around the country.

Strangely, the environment lobby has largely been quiet on Peak Oil despite the possibility that the search for new oil reserves could bring drilling to the Great Barrier Reef and to areas offshore of popular beaches. Proposals to drill off Sydney beaches in the past have been met with stiff opposition.

What prospect local food?

If it is impossible to buy locally-bottled water in Byron Bay, what chance do local food producers have of gaining the support of people in town? And is there any sentiment in town to support them?

It seems there is, if the success of the Byron Farmers Market is any indication. Like other farmers markets around Australia, Byron's attracts hundreds to its weekly sales day. And watching the shoppers, you see interactions that simply cannot happen in the supermarket or the organic food store as consumers question growers about their produce and growers talk to townspeople about the realities of farming. This is all positive exchange. Unlike the supermarkets, a huge middleman between farmer and consumer, the relationship at farmers markets is direct and first-person. The same goes for the town's monthly arts and crafts market where local food, both fresh and cooked, is sold.

Hope that the town's supermarket and organic food shops would stock a greater range of processed and fresh local product is raised when shoppers find locally-produced coffees on their shelves. The question is whether coffee is such a specialty item that there exists high demand for local product and whether this would extend to other food lines.

In Byron Bay, it is the Green Garage that appears to have gone furthest in sourcing local food products. Expanding their range beyond coffees and teas, the Green Garage stocks a range of fruit, vegetables, herbs and processed products. Their policy seems to be to try for the local product before bringing down foods from the Brisbane markets which, anyway, is less that 200km from Byron Bay. Brisbane might not supply local food, but at least it does not have the food miles of products in other businesses.

The beginnings of a local food system, it seems, are already present in town. What will be needed to increase the market share of local product is a concerted campaign - a campaign for local food and against the subsidies and food miles of imported goods. Then there is the question of local growers and processors producing sufficient quantity to satisfy regional demand. That may take a little time, but it might happen sooner than some think. And let's hope that somebody has the sense to tap a local creek so we can buy Byron's own fresh water