Welcome to Spring. (Doesn't feel like it, does it?) It may be of some interest to note that Spring is also known as the time of "the green famine", or it once was, as winter stores would be depleted and although new plantings may be showing growth and a promise of abundance soon, the larder and root cellar could be looking pretty bare.
The system that relies on agribuisness is doomed to failure. The only real food security is what you have on hand, what you can grow and what you can procure from others. The more farmers we lose, the more dire the future looks. Not that all farmers were worth saving. A short trip into the country will show the pasture depleted down to a yellow/brown husk of it's former glory. ( I can remember a boyhood trip through Victoria when the grass was greener than anything I had seen and knee-high. What happened? ) Poor management, or no management, as the easy money rolled in saw us lose 'the fat of the land'.
My list of needs is much simpler than Max-Neef's. It consists of: Clean Water; Clean Air; Clean Food; Clothing; Shelter; Privacy and Love. The current system fails on many of those items in my list, so I have abandoned the current system to it's fate. I now look to myself for my needs but I really wish 'they' would stop messing up the air and the water and for the sake of others, the food.

One final note. I see no reason why 'public funding' should go to benefit private corporations at all, ever, especially when they are so rich and powerful anyway. Fund education, fund housing, fund collective urban farming. Stop giving our money to the banksters.
[Here comes the red.]

When the article suggests obesity can be caused by inadequate food, is that describing isolated populations who literally can only access certain types of food - not, say, populations in suburban areas who (for whatever reason) choose to eat certain types of food?

I just wanted to comment upon this point: "While most food related research is aimed at improving profits in agribusinesses – including supermarkets – the wide scope of people’s concerns ought to be addressed in publicly funded research."

I would actually restate this as most of the food related programs, such as the new agri-food plan, are aimed at improving tertiary agribusiness profits. Whilst there is plenty of research aimed at improving cultivars and production systems, this is usually funded by grower levees. The larger plans are always focussed on how to pay the farmer the least amount of money by having them produce more from less, whilst the consumer pays an indexed price that remains relatively static.

Essentially the primary interest is the foreign market place and the supermarkets. Very little interest is held for the small business (farmer) end of things. I agree that the industry and community needs to look more closely at the wider issues. I'd suggest some sort of landholder scheme that employs farmers as land custodians. Thus, a proportion of their time and annual income is guaranteed to undertake environmental issues (e.g. maintaining ground cover).

There are many other ways to do this, my idea is just one way. But either way, the primary producers need to valued more highly, rather than being the victims of markets, seasons, climate change, industry, business and government, and then criticised for it.

I have had a quick read of “HUMAN SCALE DEVELOPMENT…CONCEPTION, APPLICATION AND FURTHER REFLECTIONS”

http://www.max-neef.cl/download/Max-neef_Human_Scale_development.pdf

It is interesting, and contains lines such as “Fundamental human needs …are the same in all cultures and in all historical periods. What changes, both over time and through cultures, is the way or the mean by which the needs are satisfied.”

Seems plausible, but if there are nine fundamental human needs (subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity and freedom), the big question is how much subsistence, protection, affection, understanding etc is necessary?

For example, should every Australian house have its own armed guard to help ensure protection of the occupants, or would this be excessive, overly expensive and unnecessary protection.

In the case of food, it appears that only 1% of Australia is arable, or can be used for sustainable food production in the longer term, and any increase in this country’s current population is just plain stupid, and unlikely to meet many human needs at all.

We are simply not clever enough to force nature to meet human needs when the population is too large.

Quentin, I look forward to reading your book and I am pleased you have approached the food from a complex meta-systemic perspective.

However I am disappointed that this article explained food sovereignty in such simplistic and reductionist terms as "control of production". Food sovereignty is a systemic critical analysis (and solutions) of the human right to food. Perhaps a simple link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_sovereignty would have been a better response?

A comment or two about research into the food system and resilience. Resilient systems (biological or 'artificial') all have the same basic architecture and their resilience is directly proportionate to the breadth and depth of diversity within the system. Distributed (horizontal) systems and networks are the most resilient (the internet is a resilient 'fail-safe' system), so that is what our food systems should look like when represented as a two dimensional image.

At the moment all of the first/affluent world food systems are: linear, long chain, centralised, bottle necked, in silos and very wasteful/inefficient. This means they lack systemic resilience. That the affluent world is encouraging (forcing?) this inherently unstable model on the developing world is also a disaster in the making.

In short we already know what a resilient system should look like, so I agree, it is time for public policy, funds and research to be applied to the food system in Australia to ensure resilience.

A timely article on a real issue the majority of the population in developed countries seldom would give even passing thought to, until supermarket shelves have empty spaces appearing. Access to affordable food, like power and water is taken as a right, and any deficiency a failure by "others" punishable at the ballot box.

Yet any informed observer knows this seeming abundance runs on a ever decreasing narrow strip of adequacy with a yawning abyss on either side. It is a little like the old story on perspectives I heard as a child about the young boy growing up in a little house on an isolated stretch of flat road which disappeared in a straight line into the distance, he asked his Grandfather what was at the end of the road as to his eyes it came together in a point. No you are being fooled by perspective of distance, the road always remains the same width, it just appears narrower the further away it is, it is simply explained if you understand science.... One day the boy left the house and walked along the road but it became ever narrower until finally it came to point where he could no longer follow it. He walked back to the house to ask his Grandfather what this meant, but on returning found he had died so there was no one to help him.

Food security stretching into the future is like the road in the story, the boy is future generations and the Grandfather is the present one.

The point I take from Quentin's article is "Are we taking food too much for granted or is there a problem we need to study more before declaring it solved?"