CORRECTED VERSION
OUTER SUBURBAN/INTERFACE SERVICES AND DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
Agribusiness Subcommittee
Inquiry into sustainable development of agribusiness in outer suburban Melbourne
Melbourne— 26 March 2009
Members
MsC. Hartland / MrD. NardellaMrD. Hodgett
Chair: MrD. Nardella
Staff
Executive Officer: MrS. ColeyResearch Officer: MrK. Delaney
Witness
Ms Kirsten Larsen, Policy Research Manager
Victorian EcoInnovation Lab, University of Melbourne (affirmed).
The CHAIR— Can you state your name and address and either take the oath or make an affirmation.
MsLARSEN— I am Kirsten Larsen from the Victorian EcoInnovation Lab at the University of Melbourne. The address is 207Bouverie Street, University of Melbourne.
The CHAIR— All evidence taken at this hearing is protected by parliamentary privilege as provided by the Constitution Act 1975 and further subject to the provisions of the Parliamentary Committees Act 2003 and the Defamation Act 2005, and where applicable the provisions of reciprocal legislation in other Australian states and territories. Any comments you make outside the hearing may not be afforded such privilege. So if you make any defamatory comments in here, you are protected; if you walk outside and say them, you are not protected. We will record the evidence and will provide a proof version of the Hansard transcript at the earliest opportunity for you to correct as appropriate. Can you present to us in about 10minutes, which will leave about 20minutes for questions.
Overheads shown.
MsLARSEN— Basically in the presentation I have tried to pull out the key points of the submission. Obviously you have heard from lots of people who have known lots more about planning and things than me, so I will really focus specifically on our area of research, which has been about the sustainability of the food system and the environmental resource constraint threats to food security potentially, and the role we think periurban agriculture can play in alleviating that.
Firstly, outlining the structure of the submission we basically took, we investigated the impediments faced by the industry and highlighted how some of the options for sustainable food production can be ways to overcome those impediments. At the end I will touch more briefly on how this can lead to potentially different kinds of jobs in industries, and finish with some very quick recommendations for planning.
Do not try to follow this; most of the detail on the slides is in the submission. It is just generally putting the case that across Australia and across the world there are issues with water scarcity and quality. The graph at the top is of CSIRO projections of irrigation water availability in the MurrayDarling Basin under two different climate change scenarios. You might be able to see Victoria on the right. Under a medium climate change scenario there is about 45per cent less water available for irrigation; under a high climate change scenario there is about 95per cent less water. This is a significant problem for Australia’s food bowl. The graph at the bottom is about embodied water in Victorian final consumption, which basically shows that for Victorian householders about 40per cent of our water is actually in our food. So a scarcity of water will relate directly to food prices.
Then we are kind of flipping around. If we start talking about the city and periurban areas, there is a way of looking at this as an abundance of water. I know this does not seem likely in practicality on the ground, but actually there is. The City of Melbourne has done a study called City as a Catchment, which found that about 80per cent of the water that Melbourne currently uses falls on the city and can be captured and could be used. The same study found approximately 3gigalitres— so about 12per cent of total water— is already used for outside irrigation, both in public spaces and private gardens. So I did a few little calculations, saying that if you used about 10per cent of the public space water and 25per cent of the garden water, you can reduce the cost of producing somewhere between $5million and $20million worth of fruit and vegetables. Those were based on numbers from about 2005, so it would be worth a lot more now.
The other point there is about direct conversion of rainfall. When it falls in catchments and comes into dams it evaporates and moves through the system. The water that becomes available in the city I think——
I will not say that, actually, because I am on the Hansard record and do not want to get my stats wrong. But when it falls in the city and is caught as rainfall you can directly be converting it into food production, the same as in perurban urban areas.
This refers to nutrients— fertilisers, basically. The top left graph is basically looking at increased demand for food around the world, both in terms of population and in changing food types, and the increased demand for nutrients. Fertilisers are part of that— nitrogen, phosphate and potash. You can see that that is huge. What we saw last year was skyrocketing fertiliser prices. That was due to a connection with the oil price. Nitrogen fertilisers basically come from a process which involves natural gas, so it is directly hiked with the oil price. Phosphate fertilisers are mined from phosphate rock. The global production of phosphate rock has already peaked and is declining, so we cannot expect to continue to be able to get the fertilisers that we have been using. Then we can flip that around again and look at, ‘Okay, so what have we got in the city?’. Around 40per cent of our municipal waste is food and organic waste, which can be converted back into nutrient sources for food production, but it is bulky and so there are high transport costs to move that back out to rural areas. Also, you can produce energy from these processes, which can potentially be used in urban areas. And over 80per cent of the phosphorus and nitrogen that is basically from human waste could be used for agriculture if it is being captured and treated. That picture on the right is just to demonstrate that I am not completely mad. The Swedish are already doing this; they have urineseparating toilets and they separate the urine and use it straight into agriculture.
The end of cheap oil is basically stepping this up a little bit. I refer to peak oil. If it has not already happened, we are now getting fairly conservative sources confirming that this is going to happen. Even the International Energy Agency, although not in so many words, has now acknowledged that our production is not going to continue to increase. There is a little graph there in the middle. I also put a quote down at the bottom. This is from the Queensland government. It had an oil vulnerability task force that did a full assessment of Queensland’s vulnerability to oil. Obviously agriculture came up as a big problem because, as I have explained, it is not just about oil for transport; it is about fertilisers and it is about how people get to food.
It is good to bring this home again every now and then. Climate change is a big problem, and it is not just an incidental thing or a quibbling about— not a quibbling— serious discussions about the kinds of policy mechanisms that we treat it with. The fact is that it is already happening. In 200708, 84per cent of Australian agricultural producers reported unseasonal conditions affecting their production. We can see that the graph on the right basically drops in tonnes of Victorian fruit and vegetable production, as these things have gone down. Between the years 2004 and 2006 Australian wheat and course grains declined— by 53per cent for wheat. I will have to check those figures. They are written in the submission, so go with the ones in the submission. We saw this again with heat waves and bushfires in January. In the context of that, we would put forward that we need to be aiming for zero carbon food in the long term. That is where we need to be going.
Food accounts for about 28per cent of household greenhouse gas emissions, so if we have a carbon price that is really running through the food system and running through the economy, that is going to have a big implication for food prices. Food prices already impact on disadvantaged communities.
I will quickly explain that little graph at the bottom. You cannot really see it, but there are different urban settlements in the UK ranging from the UK average on the left to the best practice BedZED zero carbon settlements on the right with active participants. The big orange block in the middle is the impact of the food production, so you can see we are getting headway on everything else but noone has really applied their minds to how we reduce the emissions from our food system. We would say the first thing you do is value the land and the soils that we can use for food production. If we start with good soils, we need less nutrients to start with. Lots of those are already around Melbourne.
The pictures on the left I am sure you are familiar with— the value of agricultural production around Melbourne— and the red spaces on the bottom, one where we have currently got urban growth zones for fasttracking for residential development. We are currently in the process of relooking at the urban growth boundary and it is quite likely we will lose more of this land unless the government chooses not to. We also need to think about ‘Okay, so some of this is already going to happen, how do we rethink about the areas we are going to develop? Can we work out which soils we need to use within the urban settlements, and how do we change the way we relate to food within our urban spaces?’.
In the ecocities there are buildings already doing green roofs. One thing Rick Roush really wanted me to say was that Melbourne University’s Burnley campus, has a big project around green roofs. It is not all easy and we have not started looking at how to integrate food into that, but it is possible. On the right are the opportunities for synergy in periurban areas where you can design your urban settlements so that you are increasing the viability of the farms next door through access to nutrients, to water and transfer of energy— and skills.
We have called this food sensitive urban design. It is about how we think about urban spaces and urban design in a way that integrates food. These are basically just slightly adjusted versions of watersensitive urban design, thinking about food as we design urban spaces, so getting infrastructure in from the start— local production and processing, distribution and access— and thinking about how this is good for communities, amenity and spaces.
Lots of new jobs and businesses are possible when we start to think about this. The one that I will particularly point to is a publication from Illinois. At the moment it has just been presented to their state legislature, and I can send it to you: ‘Local Food, Farms and Jobs: Growing the Illinois Economy’, basically as a way of doing regional economic development. They have estimated that money spent on local food production processing businesses et cetera creates a multiplier effect and stays within the regional economies. As we are going forward, and particularly in difficult economic times, this can offer jobs where people do not have to travel long distances and strengthen the local economy, and we can have a whole range of different skills and skill levels involved in these kinds of jobs.
Basically VEIL’s position is that food production in outer suburban as well as in urban Melbourne will be critical to the supply of healthy and sustainable food. The ability of periurban businesses and enterprises to do sustainable food production will be critical to their viability, and the pursuit of sustainable food production and healthy and sustainable prosperous outer suburban areas can create opportunities for new businesses and enterprises. Then we had a couple of recommendations for planning, but they are in the submission, and just some other resources that I have come across more recently that you might want to have a look at.
The CHAIR— Questions.
MrHODGETT— When I read the submission and it talked about planning, one of the recommendations was integrating food production and residential development, and I immediately jumped to the conclusion of the righttofarm issues and wanted to explore your thoughts on that, but looking at your last few slides there, is your thinking there more, in both metropolitan Melbourne and the outer suburbs, in the slides you are suggesting integrating rooftop gardens in that, or is your thinking there about righttofarm issues?
MsLARSEN— It is both, so I think that basically— I will not flick back to the slides because we will just get lost— there are two ways of looking at this. The submission I referred to at the bottom went into the Crown land inquiry because I think it is about spaces within urban areas, but it is also where we have some of these issues on the periurban fringe and how we reconsider some of the options, so in the righttofarm issues can we potentially alleviate some of them by having more direct access to markets so that the farmers and consumers have better relationships, and that can potentially be through jobs and things like that as well. I know it sounds ridiculously idealistic, but in light of the challenges we are facing, I think we need to be willing to think about different kinds of systems. Certainly where this has been done in cities around the world and they have got highly productive urban and outer suburban farms, there are good relationships because they are good community spaces, generally organic farming, so less issues with spraying and chemicals, things like that, and to be having those kinds of exchanges can be beneficial for both sides.