A new report has found rural and regional areas, including Ballarat, could be spared some of the major disruptions to food supply caused by climate change.
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The report, released on Wednesday by Farmers for Climate Action, found regional areas - which typically rely more heavily on independent grocery stores with shorter supply chains - were better positioned than their urban counterparts to withstand the impact of catastrophic weather events on food supply, including bushfires and floods.
The research finds support in the recent experience of independent grocery stores in rural communities, which - unlike major supermarket chains - were able to maintain continuity of supply throughout the Omicron wave.
"Shorter food supply chains have several advantages in terms of resilience in the face of climate change," said the report's author, Stephen Bartos - an expert in food resilience and governance.
"While any one small food chain is equally likely to be disrupted by an extreme event as a long [food] chain, the fact there are more of them spreads the risk of disruption."
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Mr Bartos said climate change had already rendered every stage of the traditional food supply chain more fragile, from the production side through to the transport of produce and the cascading costs borne by the consumer.
"Australians take it for granted that food will always be available," he said.
"But climate change disrupts this; it creates and amplifies risks all the way through the supply chain, from farm to warehouse to supermarket shelves."
Organic olive grove farmer Campbell Mercer - who owns and operates Manna Hill Estate at Mount Egerton, near Ballarat - said the underlying problem with traditional or dominant supply chains was that it took very little in the way of external events or pressure to overwhelm them.
"Most supply chains are relatively tenuous because they are very, very long as a general rule and work on the 'just-in-time' principle," Mr Mercer said.
"As we've seen with the flooding up in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, and also [with] the rail links across to Western Australia which have been cut off because of unprecedented rain events, [traditional] supply chains are easily disrupted by these sorts of events.
"So, by supplying your local community from local farms, you definitely end up with a much more robust, resilient system than you would under any other circumstance."
Mr Mercer, who for two decades has supplied produce to local farmers' markets and independent groceries, including Wilsons Fruit and Vegetables and Ballarat Wholefoods Collective, said shorter supply chains were also attractive from the point of view of the environment, so far as they resulted in reduced carbon emissions.
"We're always looking to mitigate the impact of climate change, which is why I'm very focused on shortening that supply chain as much as possible [by] supplying directly to the local community and getting the local community more engaged with buying from local suppliers," he said.
"Because you're not transporting your product nearly so far, that helps to reduce your carbon footprint and some of the issues around climate change."
It's a sentiment shared by Blk 454 Chem Free produce grower Jason Waller, who said local supply chains would, in his opinion, be the way of the future.
"The community needs to go back a step and bring back local supply chains by sourcing their food more locally," Mr Waller said.
"I've tried to encourage that myself for many years through market gardening and various farm shops where we try to supply more local stuff."
That said, neither Mr Waller nor Mr Mercer were of the view regional and rural communities could avoid the cataclysmic consequences of climate change through local supply chains alone if global warming continued unabated.
"The individual farmer can try to address the impacts of climate change through minimising their carbon footprint as much as possible but there's a limit to what individual farmers can collectively do," Mr Mercer said.
"We really need overarching government direction to support a transition to a lower carbon economy.
"[Farmers] are deeply concerned about climate change because there's so much to be done and we have a very short window of opportunity with which to do it and certainly the federal government is not making any meaningful progress in that direction at all - in fact, you could say they're trying to slow down the whole process."
In a similar vein, Mr Waller said all farmers were feeling the impact of climate change and had noticed a rapid change in weather patterns and events over the last few years.
"Things have changed dramatically in recent times - farmers can no longer rely on the old 'just plant it and harvest' mentality," he said.
"And things have now certainly got really critical and every year is more challenging - but I don't think the federal government even cares; they're doing nothing to address climate change."
In the report Mr Bartos, likewise, concluded that even the most robust supply chain networks would collapse under the impact of global warming should the government fail to take "decisive action" to limit carbon emissions.
"There are limits to adaptation," he said. "If we rely only on adaptation, we are going to get to a point where all of those measures will just be nothing in the face of climate change."
"A lack of action will make it virtually certain that in coming decades Australians will, for the first time, face the prospect of running out of food because supply chains fail.
"So, deep emissions cuts are essential."
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