A strong and sustainable regional food system has the potential to have a positive influence across a number of the social determinants of health. Access to fresh, nutritious food is a basic human right, yet many in our communities lack the agency to choose due to socioeconomic disparity. WHGNE supports a ‘food with dignity’ approach in addressing food security at a whole of population level, at all times.
The choices we make as individuals are limited by factors like income, education, location, access to housing, transport and other vital services. Therefore, although we are presented with choices of how and what we eat in theory, in practice we are subject to inequitable access to food choices. Factors beyond our control, like the cost-of-living crisis facing Australians, heavily inform how we are able to access food.
Reducing stigma and increasing agency
WHGNE recommends that to ensure all Victorians are afforded food with dignity, a rights-based approach is embedded across the systems and structures shaping food security initiatives, including health promotion activities to reduce social stigma around food insecurity and poverty.
It is vital for decision-makers, educational and health institutions, business and service providers to recognise that promoting healthy eating through an ‘individual choice’ approach is ineffective and even harmful in fostering positive health outcomes due to a lack of acknowledgement of structural and systemic barriers to food choices inherent in centring individual responsibility. Empowering people to source and eat local produce, start a vegetable garden, reduce waste and food miles, or to buy food with less packaging must be approached through a strengths-based lens without expecting individuals to overcome challenging barriers to achieving these goals, like poverty, low educational attainment, social or geographical isolation, housing insecurity, time scarcity, disability and experiences of gender-based violence.
A gender lens on food security
An important factor in addressing food insecurity, and one which sits within WHGNE’s remit, is increasing gender equality. Women face a range of socioeconomic disparities, which compound experiences of food insecurity and impact negatively on women’s health and wellbeing. Increasing support and tailoring policies to empower women economically, through the mechanisms in place via the Gender Equality Act will contribute to food security and improve health and wellbeing outcomes.
It is vital to consider these measures to support intersectional access to food security among other cohorts disproportionately impacted by economic insecurity and access to resources, like migrant and refugee populations, First Nations communities, people experiencing homelessness and people with disability.
Incorporating lived experience of food insecurity to policy and action
The health impacts of food insecurity only serve to increase the already disproportionate rates of mental and physical ill-health experienced by people who face intersecting forms of marginalisation. WHGNE believes policy development, projects and initiatives to address food security must be informed by lived and living experience to truly represent the diversity of needs. To close our submission, WHGNE urges the government to ensure communities are provided meaningful opportunities to engage with decision-making and policy development in the equitable access to food.
‘Equitable policy depends upon policymakers “listening to all the voices in our community, particularly those from underrepresented groups who are often unheard and have in the past been labelled as ‘hard to reach’.” If we are unable to listen to people who are often situated at the systemic margins, policy, action, collaborations and trust between government, industry and community will always fall short.’- From WHGNE’s submission to the CSIRO Transforming Australian Food Systems consultation
