‘What Happens Next?’: Is Food Insecurity Getting Worse?

Dr Susan Carland: Welcome back to “What Happens Next?”, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world, and asks the experts: What will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future?

I'm Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

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Sue Kleve: I mean, we all know that food is not just… Yes, it's so important for nutrition, but it's so much more than that. It links us to connection to community, to land, to people, to family.

Ros Gleadow: We've had the cheapest food that we've ever had, and probably the world has ever had, in the last couple few years – last four or five years. I suspect that's over. And what we need to do is make sure that the people who can't afford high-quality food are supported to be able to access and eat high-quality food.

Liza Barbour: One thing that we forget is that if we throw a strawberry in the bin, we're not just throwing that strawberry in the bin. In the bin also goes all the greenhouse gas emissions that were caused in that whole food supply chain to produce the strawberry. It's all the labour costs, it's all the pesticides, fertilisers, it's everything that's gone in the embedded water…

Dr Susan Carland: In 2007 and 2008, a perfect storm of global challenges left us facing a food crisis.

Newsreader 1: The World Food Program’s calling it perhaps the first globalised humanitarian emergency. There's more to the world food crisis than just… [Fades out]

Newsreader 2: [Fades in] ...Scuffles over the daily staple of bread in Egypt. These are just some of the scenes from countries where there just isn't enough food to go around.

Dr Susan Carland: According to a UK government Foresight Project, as the cost of staple grains such as rice, wheat and soybeans doubled or tripled, investors began speculating on food prices in the financial market, exacerbating the issue. Countries responded with export bans, but these only limited food availability and drove costs higher.

Ultimately, riots and violent demonstrations broke out, leading to military intervention in some cases and threatening global security.

[Muffled shouting and gunshots]

Newsreader 3: A street protest against rising food costs recently turned violent in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, as well as in cities in other developing countries.

Dr Susan Carland: And it all started due to a combination of natural disasters, the growing world population, and changing climate conditions. Sound familiar?

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Dr Susan Carland: Fifteen years later, food insecurity is back in the spotlight. Those same underlying circumstances haven't gone away. And although we learned important lessons from the 2008 crisis, our existing food systems haven't changed much.

Throw in a global pandemic, supply chain disruption, and a war in Europe's so-called breadbasket, and the situation looks dire.

Who's facing food insecurity? How will we feed more people than ever on an ever-warming planet? And what can we do to help? Keep listening to find out what happens next.

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Sue Kleve: Hi, I'm Sue Kleve. I'm from the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food here at Monash University in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Science.

And my role there is, as Senior Lecturer, I have a teaching and research role there. But I'm also by background a community and public health dietitian, so I spent many years working out in the community across a number of settings, working with people, and to really work with them and to support their access to food.

So for me, it's kind of been a journey from very much practice into the world of academia. So I kind of call myself a “pracademic”.

Dr Susan Carland: Sue, welcome to the podcast.

Sue Kleve: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dr Susan Carland: Can you describe to us what food insecurity is? And how does it differ to, say, being hungry?

Sue Kleve: I'm actually going to flip it and say, this is what food security means, OK?

Dr Susan Carland: OK.

Sue Kleve: So essentially, it's a basic human right that we all have access to food, OK? And so food security is part of that.

And it's this really kind of very jargonistic definition that we have. But essentially what it means is that people on a day-to-day basis have regular, reliable, physical, social and economic access to enough food that meets their cultural needs, their dietary preferences in particular.

And I guess the one thing that's really important to this is that that access is in a way that – say, for example, if it's challenged – that it's not in the way that people are not getting those particular foods, or they're not having to rely on emergency food relief. They're not scavenging for food, that sort of thing.

So I think it's upheld with dignity and choice. And as I said, linking back to that basic human right: We all need to eat.

Dr Susan Carland: Yeah. And I really like what you said about it being culturally relevant as well. I imagine so… the French need a lot of access to cheese [laughter], but it is also about recognising that what is appropriate for different people will look different in different circumstances, and they need to have the food that makes sense to them.

Sue Kleve: Absolutely. And I mean, we all know that food is not just… Yes, it's so important for nutrition, but it's so much more than that. It links us to connection to community, to land, to people, to family. So it's so important that we uphold that right.

Dr Susan Carland: And I – rather ignorantly, obviously – would have imagined that in a relatively wealthy country like Australia, surely there wouldn't be much food insecurity, but I gather you're going to tell me that that is not the case.

Sue Kleve: Absolutely. So I think probably when we think about the term “food insecurity”, we might automatically perhaps go to developing countries, to use that term. And we have those visions of that famine, people really going very hungry.

But unfortunately what we're seeing – that certainly is quite challenging, but what we are seeing in high-income countries like Australia, increasingly many people are experiencing food insecurity.

And so by that, what I mean, there's this kind of continuum of experience, OK?

So it can start off where we don't have those challenges around accessing food. But for some people it can be starting off, they're starting to get stressed, worried, concerned about whether they can put food on the table to feed themselves and their household. It can grow, progress to changing, starting to change and make sacrifices around the types of foods that they might normally choose. It can mean cutting down on the volume of foods as well.

And I guess probably what we'd sort of see, the really pointy end of the spectrum, is where people are going without food in a household.

And quite often what we'll see is that, if there's households with children, it's the parents who really... They make those sacrifices so that they're not seeing their children sort of experiencing this.

So I think, in answer to your question, it is a very hidden problem, particularly certainly in Australia because it also goes with that very much around the shame that people have facing challenges. But I think certainly through the last couple of years, in terms of with COVID, with some of the impacts around the challenges to our food supply, increasingly more Australians are experiencing this.

Dr Susan Carland: So food insecurity is actually getting worse in Australia, not better? That's correct?

Sue Kleve: Yeah, I think as I sort of said, it's become more visible.

One of the things, the real challenges that we have in Australia is we don't actually have a really good handle on the numbers. And if we look at how it's actually measured… So the Australian Bureau of Statistics, every about three to four... Well, probably about four years as part of one of their national surveys, they have this question, which is a single-item question which basically says, “In the last 12 months, due to financial reasons, did you run out of food?”

Dr Susan Carland: Mm.

Sue Kleve: So it's important, firstly, that the ABS are asking this question. But the problem with this is that it's not every year that we're getting this perspective. The other problem, bringing back to that spectrum of experience – it's only measuring that pointy end when we know that people can slide up and down this continuum of experience.

And so in other countries, particularly like the US, and Canada and now also the UK, they're using a much more robust kind of measurement that gives them that much better picture of what it is.

Dr Susan Carland: How do you measure something that people might be ashamed to say that they are, or are experiencing?

Sue Kleve: Yeah, again, that's a really good point. So while we've got that kind of prevalence statistic kind of measure, I think there's the value of working with people to understand that experience.

So for me, I guess in my work that I do, I kind of straddle both of those spheres. So in terms of certainly getting the prevalence, the statistics amongst different kind of sections of the population, but very much in talking with people to really understand what this means and what this looks like.

Because of the factors that really impact on and putting households in this challenge, they’re really quite complex. And how it looks in one area or one household, those challenges may be different, OK?

But what we do know is the core real determinants for this, for households, particularly centre around adequate income. So factors like unemployment and underemployment is really important in terms of factors that impact on it.

Having unstable housing, or we know that potentially households that are renting potentially also are at greater risk of this experience as well. So there's these core, big determinants.

So particularly for households that are living below the poverty line, they certainly face many challenges.

So the core determinants quite often centre around more than just, “If we give people food that's going to solve the problem. It's going to bring them out.” It won't. What it might do is relieve the immediacy of the experience, but it's not going to lift people out of the experience. So sometimes we sort of refer to it as a bit of a band-aid.

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Liza Barbour: So unfortunately in Australia, food insecurity is a really big problem.

Dr Susan Carland: Liza Barbour is a dietitian working in public health, nutrition and food sustainability systems at Monash University.

Liza Barbour: I think there's stats last year, 1.2 million children in Australia experienced food insecurity. I think it was one in six adults have experienced food insecurity in the last 12 months. So it's a really big problem. COVID made it worse.

And sadly in Australia, our biggest response to food insecurity is to offer emergency food relief. So that's asking people to line up at a soup kitchen or a food van to get food that, in many cases, would otherwise go to waste. And so we are using that to feed people.

Dr Susan Carland: So you said that when there is instances of food insecurity, sort of the common way to address it is to have emergency food supplies, or whatever. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing?

Liza Barbour: Yeah, it's a good question. It is our only thing in Australia, and it's certainly not addressing the root causes of food insecurity.

So we can look to responses in places like… Canada are much more progressed in this area than we are. We need to increase income, the basic income that people are relying on.

There's research to show that we've got our Australian dietary guidelines that tell us what food we should be eating to maintain a healthy life. And research has shown that if you're on welfare payments, there is no way you can afford that food. So we are setting people up to fail, there's just not enough money. So we do need to absolutely raise the rate.

And then affordable housing is another big issue. If you don't have a roof over your head, food is not really something that you're thinking about at that point. So thinking of that Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we really have really big issues here in Australia and food insecurity is one of those.

Dr Susan Carland: The problems aren't all systemic. Australia has another problem – a big one.

One of your areas of expertise is sustainable food systems. What is a sustainable food system?

Liza Barbour: Most people think of the food system as just that kind of journey from paddock to plate, and those steps that we go through of like producing the food and transporting it, consuming it, and then wasting it. But what I've learned is it's actually so much bigger than that.

So that's a really big part of the food system. But then you've got all these other activities and factors that influence the food supply chain. So you've got public policy, you've got different regulations that are in place, but then probably the most overlooked part is all the people that are involved in that process. And so it's all the humans behind growing our food and driving the trucks and the planes and moving food from A to B. So it's the humans behind the food supply chain that make up a really big part of the system.

And I guess that as well, that includes us. So us all… We all consume food, so we're all a really important part of the food system as well.

Dr Susan Carland: Do you think we have a good sustainable food system in Australia?

Liza Barbour: No, absolutely not. And we’re not unique. Unfortunately, I am sad to say that we're probably one of the worst if you look at a global picture.

Dr Susan Carland: Why are we so bad?

Liza Barbour: Yeah. So I just actually read this really alarming statistic: Researchers have recently revealed that if the global population were to eat the way we eat in Australia, we would need six-and-a-half Earths by 2050 in order to support food production.

Dr Susan Carland: Is that because we eat too much or we waste too much?

Liza Barbour: It's both, and it's other things as well.

So we’re eating the wrong foods, we're over-consuming foods, and then we are wasting a huge amount of food.

I think one thing that we forget is that if we throw a strawberry in the bin, we are not just throwing that strawberry in the bin. In the bin also goes all the greenhouse gas emissions that were caused in that whole food supply chain to produce the strawberry. It's all the labour costs, it's all the pesticides, fertilisers, it's everything that's gone in the embedded water.

So yeah, food waste. It's a horrible problem that we really need to address pretty quickly.

Dr Susan Carland: Ian Carson is the co-founder of SecondBite, a national food rescue organisation here in Australia. Ian, welcome. Tell us about SecondBite. What do you do?

Ian Carson: So SecondBite is a voluntary organisation and a for-purpose organisation which rescues food which would otherwise be thrown away or discarded for a whole variety of reasons. And it collects that food, and it distributes it to agencies like the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, St. Vincent de Paul Sacred Heart Mission, who then give it to people who are in need.

Dr Susan Carland: Mm.

Ian Carson: And SecondBite collects food from places like Coles, Safeway, markets, growers. And it takes that food to over 1,400 agencies in virtually every community in Australia, and gives it to those in need, free of charge.

Last year, SecondBite collected enough food to provide over 50 million meals to those in need. So that's fantastic, but it's also really tragic.

Dr Susan Carland: Yes, it's an indictment that much food was going to be chucked out.

Ian Carson: It is. It is an absolute indictment on us. If we look at all the food that's wasted in Australia or around the world, the biggest issue is actually in our fridges at home.

Dr Susan Carland: Yeah. Right.

Ian Carson: Fifty per cent of the food that's wasted is wasted from our fridges, OK? Five per cent is wasted at the supermarkets and about 45 per cent is in the food chain from the grower through to the retailer.

Dr Susan Carland: You mentioned some of the global things that are happening to impact food security. I wanted to ask you about that. Because I noticed, I went and bought a cauliflower the other day. It was about $8, which is a lot for a cauliflower. And then when I went home and finally a week later remembered that I had the cauliflower, I was horrified to see there were already some brown bits on it. And as I was scraping it off last night, I'm like, “I'm just sending dollars down the drain because I should have cooked this earlier.” So I'm part of that 45 per cent.

But I wanted to ask you, you mentioned about floods and COVID affecting the food supply chain and food security. How do events in… How does the war in Ukraine, for example, affect our food supply here in Melbourne, and why?

Ian Carson: Global food insecurity has dramatically increased because of the war in Ukraine. So that's a horrendous event for the world.

In Australia, I think we've seen some prices increase, grain and things like that because there's shortages globally. So we are seeing an increase in prices and we are probably seeing people who can't afford to buy some of those foodstuffs.

And you can combine Ukraine with fuel increases, transport increases, wage increases, and a lot of basic commodities have gone up dramatically so that people, there are more people who can't afford to buy good, healthy, nutritious fruit and vegetables, who are then substituting that for poorer quality foods which are cheaper.

So what we're seeing is we're actually seeing health impacts on ordinary Australians, single-parent families or people who are on a low wage with a number of kids who are trying to pay a mortgage and they literally have to go without meals. And parents will go without a meal so their kids can eat, or they'll substitute poorer quality, less nutritious foods. So we're seeing a decline in health because of things like the floods and Ukraine.

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Dr Susan Carland: And then there's the elephant in the room: climate change.

Professor Ros Gleadow is a biologist in Monash University's Faculty of Science studying the effects of climate change on plants. Has climate change affected people's access to food already, or is that a future problem?

Ros Gleadow: We still have enough food on the planet, but the timeline of how much food we have in store is short at the moment.

It's still longer than it was back in 2008 when we had the food crisis. I think there was only a few months’ worth of food left in the world, which is way too little. So it's not as bad as that now. And some of these will be associated currently with the political conflict. We've got these major droughts happening in Europe, we've got export issues, and within Australia we have the floods.

Now, how has floods affected food security? Well, in parts of Victoria and certainly Western Australia, we've actually had really good wheat crops because we've had good rainfall, so that's in terms of bulk amount of food.

But we have had disruptions to supply lines. I think one of the things that food security has really emphasised for me, again, this is a bit outside my field because I'm a plant scientist, but is that we need to have supply chains sorted out.

And if those supply chains are broken or if they're very long, like food from Australia being sent somewhere else in the world to be processed and then come back here, that's not really super-sensible when those supply chains could be disrupted by floods or cyclones or anything else that's going on, which are becoming more prevalent.

Dr Susan Carland: If we don't sort out food security in Australia, but also in the world, what do things look like in the next 50 years?

Ros Gleadow: I think we can sort out these problems. So I just want to start by not being negative about that because I think these problems are solvable, but however, they are complex.

So what does it look like in the next 30, 40 years? We've got rising carbon dioxide, which can be good for plant growth because it grows better. However, we know that it also leads to decreasing protein in both leaves and grains. So the leaves – which it can be grass, to feed cattle or whatever – is not as nutritious. The grain is not as nutritious. You may not be able to make bread very well because the wheat grains will have less protein. So there's a direct carbon dioxide effect.

We have a temperature effect where, even though there could be plenty of rain in many areas as a result of climate change, the high temperatures lead to surface drying, so that can be a problem with drought. So that will be the reduction of crop yields.

And also in things like cassava and in sorghum, forage sorghum that I work on, you get an increase in the toxicity of those crops. It's probably like the same. So I'm going to paint this bad scenario of everything being bad.

The thing that actually keeps me up at late at night, there's two things. One is very high temperatures around when the crops are pollinating. Because if you have high temperatures above about 35 when pollination, you don't get viable pollen, therefore you don't get any grains. So that's really bad.

Rising sea level is seriously the thing that keeps me up at night because I think that's an ongoing issue, and salinity effects, then – the salt water gets into the ground crops and so on.

So these are really big problems. One of the things that has concerned me is that food, with the exception of perhaps iceberg lettuces, but food is actually pretty cheap. I think we've had the cheapest food that we've ever had and probably the world has ever had in the last couple few years, last four or five years. I suspect that's over. What we need to do is make sure that the people who can't afford high-quality food are supported to be able to access and eat high-quality food.

Dr Susan Carland: Do we have any food insecurity in Australia at the moment?

Ros Gleadow: I'm not an expert in this field, but the answer to that is yes.

I mean, Australia is one of the most food-secure countries in the world, both from the sense that we produce a lot of food, and we export most of it.

However, there are people who miss meals and food insecurity can be associated with people who are missing meals. There are students who are missing meals, there are people who are homeless who are missing meals, there are people with families that don't have enough money to buy their food and they're missing meals and that would fit the definition of food insecurity. And given the amount of food we produce in this country, I don't think that's acceptable.

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Dr Susan Carland: Thanks to a toxic combination of COVID, climate change, war and natural disasters, food insecurity is affecting more people than ever before.

But don't start stockpiling tins in your underground bunker just yet. In part two of our series, I'll be back with the good news about the future of food, and what you can do to make a difference. Join us next time!

Thanks to all our guests today, Dr Sue Kleve, Liza Barbour, Ian Carson AM and Professor Ros Gleadow. For more information about their work, visit our show notes.