One of the common arguments against ‘urban sprawl’ is that it endangers Australia’s food bowl – the food producing farms that sit beyond the urban fringe of our major cities.
In recent times we have witnessed alarmist reports from various bodies, such as the University of Technology Sydney, warning that Sydney risks losing 90% of its its current fresh vegetable production as development encroaches on farmland. A similar study in Melbourne found the city’s food bowl could plummet from meeting 41% of Melburnians’ food demand to 20%.
These types of reports have led various green groups to urge policy makers to ‘fix’ the growth boundaries of Australia’s major cities, in a bid to stop sprawl and save farmland.
In the lead-up to Christmas, we witnessed yet another report warning about the loss of Sydney’s food bowl. From The SMH:
According to the Sydney Food Futures project, these farmers produced more than half a million tonnes of food in 2011 – 20 per cent of the city’s needs, including 55 per cent of the supply of meat, 40 per cent of eggs, 38 per cent of dairy products, 10 per cent of vegetables and 2 per cent of fruit.
Up north, the biggest area for perishable vegetables and turf traditionally has been the Hawkesbury area, with chickens around Gosford. In the north-west, it’s cut flowers and plants in the Hills district. In the west, eggs around Penrith, ducks near Liverpool and turkeys in the Wollondilly shire. But all sorts of produce is grown all around the city in blocks as small as two to five hectares.
But in its Food Futures report, the UTS Institute For Sustainable Futures saw this food supply falling rapidly as urban development expands. In 14 years, it estimates that on current trends these farms will be responsible for just 6 per cent of the city’s food needs…
Across the city, newer residents have complained to their council about the noise, smells, traffic and use of chemicals on farms.
While there is no risk of anyone starving as the food bowl empties, farmers believe there are compelling reasons agriculture should be preserved in what planners call peri-urban – mixed rural and urban – areas.
These farms supply good quality, fresh, affordable produce, after all, contributing to the city’s food security at a time when global warming raises questions about the reliability of agriculture in inland areas. They help environmentally by reducing so-called food miles and cutting down on wastage during transport. They encourage bio-diversity, preserve wildlife corridors, provide jobs, foster tourism and offset the “urban heat island” effect.
The head of the Sydney Peri-Urban Network of Councils, Ally Dench, believes the city is at a turning point.
“Do we want to get all our produce from out west where there’s higher risk of drought and it’s a lot further to bring food, with higher transport costs?” she asks – then answers her own question. “We want good quality fresh food and that’s what you produce locally.”
But the challenge is preserving agriculture as the city gets 725,000 more homes in the next 20 years – the projection by the Greater Sydney Commission…
I personally believe that urban sprawl encroaching on local agriculture is a third-order issue. It’s not like Australia doesn’t have ample farmland that could easily be used to produce fresh food. All that it would require is for farms to move further out as land gets converted to higher value uses (i.e. housing and commercial).
That said, there are clear limits to moving farms further afield given the lack of rainfall and fertile land across Australia:
Regardless, if people are so worried about preserving fringe agricultural land, they should lobby against the Big Australia policies being run by our politicians, which funnel many tens-of-thousands of new migrants into Melbourne and Sydney each year:
It’s this mass immigration policy that drove the massive increases in Sydney’s and Melbourne’s populations over the past 12 years:
In fact, according to the NSW Government’s own projections, Sydney’s population would only increase by 210,000 over the next 20 years under zero net overseas migration, versus a 1.74 million increase in population under the current mass immigration policy:
It’s not like residents in Sydney and Melbourne aren’t already being crammed into high-rise apartments, which are the most dominant form of new housing to cater for this population explosion:
Again, if people are worried about the food bowl, then lobby against Australia’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy. But please do not use it as a fig leaf to further restrict urban land supply and further push-up the cost of housing.
