When the community food movement meets the regulators
Story by Russ Grayson about community resilience and the food we share and eat
From time to time we are called upon to defend what we hold of value. This is how Tasmania’s home and community gardens, food swaps, food charities, and community pantries spontaneously rose to oppose state government regulations that could have shut them down. It leaves us with a lesson in the effectiveness of cooperation and community resilience in food advocacy.
It starts slowly, builds momentum, and ends with a crash.
We start to hear about it in the weeks before it becomes a political issue. Those who follow such things realise what the proposed regulations mean. They put the word out through social media channels. Mainstream media picks up the story. The resistance begins.
And that’s when the cracks start to appear.
Threat generates action
A storm is brewing among home gardeners who share some of their production with community pantries and food swaps. It brews, too, among Tasmania’s community gardeners. Some community gardens grow food in common, the gardeners taking a share. How would the regulations affect them?
As they delve into the draft Primary Produce Safety (Horticulture Produce) Regulations, gardeners discover that leafy greens, berries and melons are to be classified as high-risk horticulture. Biosecurity Tasmania proclaims that anyone daring to cultivate these crops and share some of what they grow, even your everyday backyard grower, must be documented on a public register. That immediately raises privacy concerns. A daunting thirty-page food safety management plan looms ahead. It demands water testing, input verification and audits.
The spectre of accreditation haunts those who wish to donate, swap or sell their produce. It is a measure cloaked in the guise of ensuring fresh produce safety. Yet, to the home and community gardeners and food charities, this is no safety net. It is a net of control. The regulations will severely impact the food donations that Tasmania Neighbourhood Houses social programs and food charities depend on. They provide essential support to those struggling to feed their families.
The implications are stark. The red tape and the costs designed to regulate the community food sector as if it was commercial farming are insurmountable.
The proposed regulations come across as a blatant case of government micromanagement and bureaucratic overreach that threatens to stifle the Tasmanian tradition of home gardening, community food exchange and the generous sharing of surplus through food donations. Have the anonymous architects of these regulations ensconced in their offices ever paused to consider the collateral damage they would inflict? Do they even care?
Terms used in the draft regulations are ambiguous and undefined. Questions hang in the air. If these regulations are unleashed, would they be enforceable? And how would Biosecurity Tasmania wield the power to enforce them?
The drama builds to leave the future of community food systems hanging in the balance. Soon, the whispers of dissent appearing in online and mainstream media start to converge into a stream of resistance that gathers strength as the days go by.
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