A New Social Contract for Food

IPCS in partnership with the Mildura Writers Festival. Panel discussion with Gabrielle Chan, Richard Cornish, Stefano de Pieri, Pete Mailler, and Lauren Rickards.

Imagining A New Social Contract for Food and Feeding in Australia

IPCS Projects for coexistence: The Future of Food

Recorded on Monday 29 November, 7.30pm

Farming may well have always been a risky venture, but today farmers find themselves navigating the most complex and pressing knot of issues of our time—myriad effects of climate change, volatile global markets, competition with transnational investors, the transformation of regional communities, rapid technological change, water shortages, degraded soil.

Australian political culture encourages those of us who reside in cities to imagine farmers as a separate mob, ‘out there’. But as Gabrielle Chan puts it in her new book, Why You Should Give A F*ck about Farming, ‘there is no farmers and others. If you eat or wear clothes, the decisions you make influence farming’.

Bouncing off this compelling new book our panel will explore the complex forces that dominate the production and consumption of fresh food in Australia. Beginning with the pressures on farmers, it will ask: what is wrong with our food system? Why should we assume collective responsibility for farming practices? What difference could a federal department of food make? Should food be at the centre of a new imaginary and social movement for a just and healthy Australia?

This panel is the final in a series of three events sponsored by the Lord Mayors Charitable Foundation in 2020-21 in association with the IPCS Future of Food project. In 2022 IPCS shall continue this work with events that explore how we can remake city-rural relationships through the prism of First Nations farming enterprises, new movements for regenerative farming and soil health, and an exploration of the possibilities of land sharing arrangements.

Full event details here.