Urban agriculture needs to be considered as a strategic contributor to dealing with peak oil, global warming, the increasing occurrence of natural disasters, urban and city ecosystems, landscapes and designs, along with bio-security, pandemics, food terrorism, and water and waste cycles.

It has taken nearly 190 years for food security to again emerge as a political issue after Governor Macquarie established the five Macquarie Towns of Windsor, Richmond, Pitt Town, Castlereagh and Wilberforce.

Settled between 1810 and 1820, those NSW towns then functioned to service the districts that became the food bowl of Sydney.

At that time, food security was the major issue for the bourgeoning new settlement on the harbour at Farm Cove.

Soon extensive farming fed and clothed the colony, thanks to the wide range of fertile soils and microclimates of the Hawkesbury Nepean catchment.

Almost two centuries later, one of the major recommendations to come out of the Rudd Government 2020 summit was for a new government body to consider national and global food security.

Another was that the Government should survey the Northern Territory to determine its suitability as Australia’s new food bowl, which, if established, would be (chronologically) Australia’s third major food bowl, after the Sydney Basin and the Murray Darling Basin.

However, food bowls, both in Australia and internationally, have not historically provided sustainable food security.

Today, establishing food bowls is essentially about bottom line commodity development.

Such development does not guarantee sustainable food security.

Indiscriminate subdivision and urban sprawl, particularly since the 1940s, has severely impacted the Sydney food bowl.

The effect of poor water management and droughts on the Murray Darling Basin food bowl is well documented.

Projected global warming impacts including escalating cyclones and extreme weather in Northern Australia could compromise the food security capacity of any proposed Northern Territory food bowl - witness the banana shortage and resultant high prices last year due to the effects of a cyclone in northern Queensland.

Embedding local food production, processing, distribution and consumption into urban communities can play a significant part in achieving sustainable food security.

This approach is a consumer and community driven - not producer or supermarket driven - food culture.

Localised and regional food systems counter balance globalisation and play a strategic role in community health and security.

Food security has never been so critical to the future of civilisation.

Take Cuba, for example

In 1990, the Soviet Union was Cuba’s chief source of food, farm machinery and chemical fertilisers.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO) estimated the average daily calorific intake of a Cuban citizen had fallen from 2600 calories to between 1100 and 1500 by 1993.

Cuba’s nearly 10 million people were hungry and food security was a major political issue.

By 2002, nearly half of Cuba’s 33,000 hectares of fruit and vegetable allotments were urban gardens producing 3.4 million tons of food.
Cubans once again had a daily intake of 2600 calories.

More than 200,000 Cubans worked in this expanding urban agriculture sector by 2003.

In dealing with food security, Cubans unwittingly insured themselves to reduce the effects of today’s oil scares and associated rising food prices - something Australians now have to deal with.