Agriculture has had a profound impact on people and the planet. At the same time, emerging global challenges like climate change and resource scarcity are threatening the viability of food systems and there is a strong need for planned adaptation.

Over 30% of the Earth’s total land coverage has now been altered to support livestock, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation

While the rise of agriculture thousands of years ago has enabled the global population to grown, cultivating land for the production of food has been the cause of many of the drastic changes to our landscapes that we have facilitated over the last several hundred years. Producing food has a profound impact on our environment – over 30% of the Earth’s total land coverage has now been altered to support livestock, according to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Globalised food systems

Traditionally, diets were limited to food that was sourced close to where it was consumed – this is part of the reason why regionally-distinct cuisines emerged historically. For example, tropical fruit and rice are more common in Asian cuisines, where local climates allow them to grow, while root vegetables and grains are more common in European diets, where cold winters restrict many green leafy vegetables from growing. Further, these foods were grown with locally available resources like manures and crop residues for fertilisers, rainwater or modified local surface water for irrigation.

However, our food system has now become a global system, in which foods are produced in many countries of the world and exported to other markets. This has implications in terms of increased energy, waste generation, supply chain risk such as disruptions and price fluctuations. The 2008 food price spike saw food and other commodity prices spike up to 800%, triggered by drought-induced crop failures in Europe and the U.S., speculation in agricultural commodity futures markets and a surge biofuel production in the U.S. and Europe following high oil prices.

Most Australian cities are now supplied with food from many parts of the world, as well as from different parts of Australia (Gaballa and Abraham, 2008). It is not uncommon for an Australian grocery basket to contain tinned tomatoes from Italy, oranges from California or prawns from Vietnam. These long distances travelled by food items add considerably to their carbon footprint. While some foods are more efficiently produced in particular geographic regions – for example, it would not be commercially viable to produce pineapples and bananas in the Sydney region – for most foods, food miles comprise a significant proportion of their total environmental impact. Thus, consuming locally-grown foods can reduce the environmental impact of food consumption, and, simultaneously buffer against the threats and pressures.

Climate change impacts
Climate Change is expected to have serious negative consequences for food production and food security in Australia (Schmidhuber and Tubiello 2007, p. 19703). Changed rainfall patterns and increasing temperatures will make it more difficult for farmers to produce the same amount of food that they have produced historically.

Unlike the rest of NSW and much of Australia, the Sydney Basin is not expected to become less suitable for agriculture under a changing climate

Australia’s extreme weather of droughts and floods is set to become even more extreme under climate change. Australia’s climate is naturally variable, with rainfall patterns influenced by yearly and ten-yearly fluctuations making alternating periods of drought and floods common. Such variability makes food production challenging – and this will be exacerbated as our climate continues to change over the coming years. The El Niño weather patterns that bring drought to Australia are likely to become more frequent as our climate changes (Yeh et al., 2009), meaning more regular droughts, making it more difficult for farmers to produce crops and sustain livestock.

The changes to temperature and rainfall affecting plant growth and yield can also have less obvious impacts on agricultural systems by exposing soils to erosion and changing the flowering times of some plants. Increased climate uncertainty and less reliable production in many of our major agricultural regions, may compromise our ability to feed ourselves.

However – unlike the rest of NSW and much of Australia – the Sydney Basin is not expected to become less suitable for agriculture under a changing climate. As the impacts of drought, increased extreme events and temperature extremes take hold, it is likely that the role of the Sydney Basin in securing NSW’s food supply will become ever more important. With its fertile soils and reliable rainfall, the Basin is likely to play a central role in the future of food production – if we can preserve the soil and other natural resources that make agriculture in the region viable.

With a decreasing proportion of our landscape being suitable for food production over time, it will be critical to better utilise the fertile land in our coastal regions for supplying food to our population. In order to do so, we need to ensure that this land is appropriately protected, both now and into the future.

Contributions of agriculture to climate change

In addition to being a sector that will firmly feel the impacts of climate change, food production is also responsible for contributing to climate change, emitting a vast amount of carbon dioxide emissions – in Australia, the production of food is thought to be responsible for almost a quarter (23%) of all carbon dioxide emissions. Large-scale, industrial agriculture is particularly damaging to the environment, as it is associated with livestock production, long-distance transport, extensive use of herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilisers and genetically-modified organisms, as well as massive alteration of landscapes and diversion of waterways for irrigation.

Opportunities

The impacts of climate change upon agricultural production elsewhere in Australia are likely to make food production in the Sydney Basin more important to the food security of this state. We have an opportunity to create a resilient system if we preserve agricultural lands in the Basin for future production.

Further, peri-urban agriculture can support remnant vegetation, biodiversity and provides an important cooling function for our city, providing cooler spaces than adjacent suburban areas. Such areas could teach us important lessons about designing for climate-adapted cooler cities, and could play a role in making our cities resilient to the impacts of extreme heat.

Resource scarcity

In addition to water and energy, phosphorus is a crucial resource for food production. Phosphorus is an essential nutrient in fertilisers to ensure crop yields are high, yet Australia and the world’s phosphorus supply come from finite reserves largely controlled by Morocco. The security of future supply and accessibility is uncertain. While all farmers need access to phosphorus, the world’s supply of phosphate rock reserves are becoming more scarce, expensive and controlled by only a handful of countries. In 2008, the price of phosphate spiked 800%. This affected farmers from Australia to Ethiopia who could not access fertilisers, leading to farmer riots and suicides in some countries. At the same time, inefficient use of phosphorus from mine to field to fork is polluting our rivers and oceans, causing toxic algal blooms.

2015_P_reserves_globe

The good news is phosphorus can be recovered from local organic sources such as crop waste, manure, human excreta, food waste. Diversifying sources away from imports to include phosphorus recycled from such renewable sources can buffer against geopolitical risks, extend the life of the world’s finite reserves, and reduce phosphorus pollution of our rivers and oceans. Read more at www.phosphorusfutures.net.

In the Sydney Basin, the potential phosphorus supply is fifteen times more  than crop demand due to phosphorus availability in poultry manure, food waste and wastewater. This presents an opportunity to meet both Sydney and part of NSW’s agricultural demand for fertilisers in the future. Read more at P-FUTURES Sydney website.

Transporting food
Advances in transport such as refrigeration, large storage, and an increasingly global economy mean that we can bring food to our cities from much further afield than was the case a few decades ago.

Food miles

However these long travel distances mean more transport fuel – and hence greenhouse gases. The greater distance travelled by food from paddock to plate has contributed to the concept of  food miles,  describing  the total distance that food travels from where it was grown and harvested to where it is consumed.

Food miles have increased dramatically over the past 20 years – particularly in developed countries (Fagan, 2008), where affluent urban populations began to demand year-round availability of seasonal fruit and vegetables.

In a reaction to this increasingly global food market, movements have sprung up promoting local food as a means of reducing the food miles associated with consumption. ‘Locavores’ for example generally aim to buy food within a limited radius from a city or town – for example, they might aim to only consume food that was produced within 200km of a city. Sourcing food locally also generally means that only seasonal food can be consumed, which means returning to more traditional patterns of seasonally-adjusted diets.

However, as Fagan (2008) reports, the system of large-scale, industrialised agriculture that produces the majority of our food today is very energy intensive, regardless of how far away from our kitchens our food is produced. Thus, there remains some scepticism about the extent to which a ‘locavore’ diet can help to minimise the environmental impact of our food system.

Complex food distribution systems

However, the food market in Australia is more complicated than some other markets. The major supermarket chains, which control 70-80% of all food retail sales (Fagan, 2008), use regional distribution centres to package and re-distribute food. Thus, even food produced locally may be transported to a regional distribution centre to be redistributed to retail stores, adding to the food miles of a product that may have been grown close to where it is eventually consumed. For example, most of Tasmania’s fresh produce is transported to the mainland to a distribution market, before being selected, packed and shipped back for sale in Tasmanian supermarkets (Knox, 2014).

As people have become physically distanced from the source of their food, so too has their understanding of where their food comes from. Many consumers lack awareness of where or how their food is grown, who grows it or how it is transported from paddock to plate. Read more on our stakeholder page on food consumer’s food literacy.

Climate change might also affect our ability to store and transport food from distant sources. As the costs of transport fuels rise, both due to global carbon markets and increasing oil scarcity, transporting our food long distances from rural regions to cities will become more expensive. The costs of refrigerated storage will also rise, and this, too, will affect the price of fresh food. These increasing costs will reduce the affordability of fresh fruit and vegetables, potentially impacting people who are poor or elderly.

Opportunity

Food produced locally is, however, less vulnerable to these price rises. Transport distances will be much shorter for food produced on the edges of cities, and the need for storage is greatly reduced as there is a shorter time between when the food is harvested and when it lands on someone’s plate. Thus, there exists an opportunity for farmers in peri-urban areas to provide affordable food in an increasingly unaffordable market, and to minimise the relative environmental impact of the food they produce.