Community gardens promote local food production

Vanguard March 2013 p. 2
Ned K.

Free trade agreements, such as that with the United States and the looming Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, have opened the door for multinational food production companies and retail giants like Coles and Woolworths to import more food products into Australia.

Many of the grocery items on large supermarket shelves are now imported product. More fresh fruit and vegetables are also being imported. Often even Australian produced food (such as cashew nuts) travels thousands of kilometres overseas for processing before arriving back on supermarket shelves.

There is a growing resistance to these trends by the Australian people who do not want to see the country become dependent on multinational food companies and agribusinesses to feed their families. They are also increasingly concerned with the carbon footprint of the multinationals' food distribution networks, which require basic items of food to travel thousands of miles.

Resistance by the people takes many forms, from fighting mineral and coal seam gas companies' encroachment on agricultural land, to farmers' markets, to community gardens, to 'growing your own'.

People practice self-reliance

Across the capital cities of Australia, there is a rapidly developing community garden network where working people in their suburbs create community gardens for local food distribution and consumption. Some of the product is exchanged, some sold to small retailers, and some given away to those in the communities who simply can't afford to buy fresh vegetables and fruit.

Recently in Adelaide's working class suburb of Elizabeth, a number of adjoining households opened their gardens to the public on Open Gardens Day, to show what can be done. Their gardens are linked by pathways and surrounded by a smorgasboard of fruit trees and a huge variety of vegetables. The households have shared their voluntary labour and knowledge to create a food oasis in a suburb where working class households are targeted by fast food chains like McDonalds and KFC.

This is not an isolated case. There are now many varieties of community gardens springing up across the country, and like the example in Elizabeth, thousands of people networking and helping each other in working bees to develop local community food production and maintain it.

Small scale production of food in urban areas will not by itself sustain a whole country's population. Nevertheless, the experience of Havana and other Cuban towns over many years has shown that it can be an important source of food variety and health benefits for the urban population.

The unity of purpose of Australian farmers and an urban population conscious of the need to contribute to and support local food production is indeed a positive development. Readers interested in seeing the extent of people's action towards independence from agribusiness should visit the web site www.communitygarden.org.au