"If you think about our food value chain, from the producers down, it is covered by multiple departments at federal and state level, and then there are many regulatory bodies.Australians took their own meaning from the call for submissions on the topic. Many of them were like Cathy Xiao Chen, who called for more urban food production and a strong organics recycling program. Or Carolyn Ballard, who wanted to see an integrated land/water/health program directed towards long-term sustainability.
"Because it's such a complex challenge for all of us, there's no one minister that has an over-arching approach at one point in time -- that has a view on how things are happening."
The problem was, the Australian government really wasn't interested in hearing about these ideas. Michael Luscombe was calling for a free-trade-based, minimum-regulation regime focused on increased "food manufacturing." As The Australian reported: "The retailer had recommended a super-ministry, or "one minister with overall responsibility"." And that's what Australians got--a report focused on the dominant paradigm of a growth- and export-oriented model. Not much mention of a sustainable and secure food supply in-country.
Traditionally, and I'm talking here of "traditionally" stretching from Ur and the birth of agriculture until quite recently, the role of government was to manage a safe and secure food supply for their own people. After they had planned for famine, then they looked at taxing and controlling the flow of exported foodstuffs and the creation of empires. And every empire has learned, once you stop paying attention to the coming famine (and there's always a coming famine), once you allow your food system to become reliant on imports to keep the population fed, you were balancing a pyramid on its apex rather than its base. And that is an unsustainable model.
