a more prominent role in enhancing urban food security: Feeding city populations equitably cannot be left to market forces alone, but requires government and civil society-auspiced intersectoral approaches involving agriculture, urban planning, small business, and health sectors. Such approaches must acknowledge complex webs of causation between global and national policies favouring industrialisation and private equity, the elimination of food-producing habitats, transformations in food retail, consumer poverty, ignorance, and anxiety (Dixon et al., 2007, p. 126). This theme is developed by Edwards (2011a & b) in arguing that while relatively small scale and modest in comparison with major food producers, processors and suppliers, small local enterprises have the potential to grow and to prefigure the possibilities of alternative forms of production, processing and supply: ..as a reaction to the vulnerabilities of the dominant neoliberal food system based on industrialisation, privatisation, deregulation, standardisation and commodification, there are a growing number of informal, localised and community-based social practices based around food appearing in Australian cities. (p. 115) They also suggest that further research is necessary to determine the long term benefits of these local initiatives.
5. What is the extent of urban agriculture in Australian cities? As stated earlier in this review, there has been no comprehensive survey of the full range of urban agricultural activities taking place in Australian cities, but many smaller scale and more modest studies exist of some of these practices in particular cities. This section reports on the extent of urban agriculture from both the academic and ‘grey’ literature and pays particular attention to urban agriculture projects. There is little in the literature that has attempted to quantify the extent of urban agriculture in private backyards or of informal economies around growing and exchange amongst particular social groups. However, it is believed, that many such gardens and social networks do exist in Australian cities as well as in smaller towns and rural areas. There is some quantifiable information relating to some aspects of urban agriculture, but given the informal and dispersed nature of urban food growing, it is difficult to know the volume of food being grown in Australian urban areas, or indeed, the area of land dedicated to various forms of urban agriculture. For instance, the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden project report having 265 kitchen gardens in schools across Australia (see www.kitchengardenfoundation.org). Other urban agriculture related data is available from the food rescue organisation, Second Bite. Their website reports on the organisation providing 6.8 million meals across 350 community organisations, or nearly 3.5 million kilograms of food. Whilst this falls into the distribution rather production end of urban agriculture, it highlights the abundance of food being diverted from waste by just one organisation in Australia. Indeed, there are a number of organisations in Australia engaged in food rescue – and in doing so, alleviating food insecurity for a sector of the population whilst also preventing the waste of edible food. The Australian City Farms and Community gardens network is currently conducting a survey to map community gardens in Australia. Whilst data on the number of community gardens is not yet available, attempts are being made to capture the extent of some of these activities. This coincides with urban food growers’ greater use of the internet and other social media such as Twitter, blogging and Facebook, to connect, plan, distribute and share. A prime example of the creative use of social media to network urban growers and foragers can be seen on the ‘Sharing Abundance’ website Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 89