Five things government can do to encourage local food contingency plans

Abstract

Severe weather events pose significant risks to food supply chains that are reliant upon critical infrastructures such as road and rail. Can local food procurement arrangements, and contingency plans based on those arrangements, help to ameliorate food shortage in times of crisis? This article explores how governments can empower communities to this end. A broader research project provides the basis of insights and recommendations to aid policy practitioners who seek to develop food-related disaster resilience at the community level. The findings call for the following: the adoption of policies that facilitate the procurement of local food; informing council planning; facilitating shared control with those who want these changes to occur; removing the barriers to change; and utilising a suite of consultation and engagement policies to these ends. It is argued that the Australian regional context of South-East Queensland, with its inherent issues of rapid population growth, has immediate relevance to international contexts.

Keywords:

• local food procurement
• contingency plans
• disaster resilience
• risk perceptions
• governance

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by Griffith University under the Griffith University Postgraduate Research Scholarship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Blanco, Lowndes, and Pratchett (2011) identify that Policy Networks arose from traditions in the 1960s in the UK and the USA, such as policy communities and issue networks. Policy Networks operate within policy domain-specific subsystems where there is a relative visibility of policy issues and outcomes and the expectations of its select members. This is a long-standing and standard feature of policy-making as they are “really” made (2011, 298).

2 The term governance relates to the exercise of authority and control; and governing involves the right to exercise influence and authority (Delbridge and Bernard 1998).

3 This water education example refers to a successful campaign by the Queensland State government during the 2001–09 drought that encouraged people to more than halve their water usage by adopting simple conservation measures.

4 The inquiries included: The Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, the Perth Hills Bushfire Review and the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry.

5 Lyons (2001, 5) comprises the third sector as: Non-Government Organisations (NGOs); the social economy or civic society; non-profit, community-driven and voluntary sectors; and lobby and interest groups. According to Lyons (cited in Althaus, Bridgman, and Davis 2007, 18), such organisations are characteristically: “private; formally organised; derived from collective action and generating common values and benefits; voluntary in membership; not seeking personal profit; and usually democratically controlled”.