Most of us rarely think about how extraordinary the modern food system is. We can walk into a supermarket almost anywhere in Australia or Aotearoa New Zealand and find shelves filled with food grown thousands of kilometres away, transported through complex international supply chains and available throughout the year regardless of season.
But that convenience also hides a vulnerability. What happens when those supply chains are disrupted? How much of the food required to sustain our communities could actually be grown, processed, distributed and shared within the regions where we live? And perhaps most importantly: how much control do communities really have over the food systems upon which they depend?
These questions sit at the heart of the work of permaculture educator, designer and community development facilitator Robina McCurdy. For more than 35 years, Robina has worked with communities across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally to strengthen local food systems, including through the Localising Food Project.
Speaking on NENA’s Voices of the New Economy podcast, Robina explores what it would mean to move beyond simply ensuring that people have access to food towards building genuinely resilient, locally rooted and democratically controlled food systems.
At the heart of that shift is an important distinction between three ideas that can sound deceptively similar: food security, food resilience and food sovereignty.
Food security isn’t the same as food resilience
Food security is generally concerned with whether people have reliable access to sufficient, nutritious food. It is an essential goal. But food security alone doesn’t necessarily tell us very much about the system producing that food.
A community might technically be food secure while remaining almost completely dependent upon food grown elsewhere. Its supermarkets may be full, but those shelves rely upon farmers, processors, warehouses, transport networks, fuel supplies, international trade and countless other interconnected systems functioning as expected.
Under ordinary circumstances, this can create the appearance of abundance and security. Disruptions expose how fragile that security can be.
The COVID-19 pandemic offered one recent glimpse of this vulnerability as supply chains were disrupted and supermarket shelves emptied. Natural disasters can isolate communities from major transport routes. Climate change threatens harvests and agricultural productivity, while geopolitical instability and rising energy costs can affect the movement and affordability of food.
Food resilience therefore asks a different question. Rather than simply asking, do we have enough food today?, it asks: does our food system have the capacity to continue feeding us when circumstances change?
A resilient food system has diversity and redundancy built into it. It doesn’t rely entirely upon a handful of producers, distributors or supply chains. It includes local growers, community gardens, household production, seed networks, regional processing and storage infrastructure, relationships between farmers and consumers, and knowledge about how to grow and preserve food.
The goal isn’t necessarily complete local self-sufficiency. Regions will always exchange goods, knowledge and resources with one another. Rather, localisation gives communities more options. When one part of the system fails, there are other relationships and resources to draw upon.
Food sovereignty takes us one step further
Food sovereignty adds another dimension: power.
It asks not only whether people have access to food or whether the food system can withstand disruption, but who gets to determine how that system operates.
Who owns agricultural land? Who decides what gets grown? Who controls seeds? Who determines the conditions under which farmers produce food? Who owns processing and distribution infrastructure? Whose knowledge shapes agricultural practice? And how much influence do communities have over the systems responsible for feeding them?
This becomes particularly important in an increasingly industrialised and concentrated global food system. When a relatively small number of powerful corporations control significant parts of seeds, agricultural inputs, processing, logistics and retail, farmers and communities can have surprisingly little control over something as fundamental as food.
Food sovereignty seeks to reverse that relationship by putting greater power back into the hands of growers and communities. It is about building food systems shaped around ecological conditions, local knowledge, cultural needs and community priorities rather than simply maximising efficiency or profit.
Why the bioregion matters
One of the most interesting ideas in Robina’s work is the importance of thinking about food at the bioregional scale.
Our political boundaries aren’t necessarily ecological ones. Council areas, states and national borders have been drawn according to administrative and historical processes, but ecosystems organise themselves differently. Watersheds, soil types, climate, vegetation and landscapes create their own natural regions.
A bioregional approach asks us to understand the places where we live through those ecological relationships.
When applied to food, this means asking what a particular region can actually produce given its climate, soils, water, ecosystems and seasons. What food is already being grown? What could be grown? Where are the gaps? What infrastructure exists for processing, storing and distributing it? What agricultural knowledge exists within the community? What seeds are locally adapted? And what relationships need to be strengthened between producers and the people they feed?
Thinking at the bioregional scale also helps bridge a divide that often exists between cities and the countryside surrounding them. Urban communities may consume enormous quantities of food while having very little relationship with the people or landscapes responsible for producing it. Meanwhile, farmers can be economically connected to distant national or global markets rather than nearby populations.
Localising food means rebuilding those relationships.
Local food systems need more than community gardens
When we imagine local food resilience, it is easy to immediately picture backyard vegetable gardens, farmers’ markets and community gardens. These are important, but a resilient food economy requires much more.
Growing food is only one part of a food system. Food also needs to be harvested, processed, preserved, stored, transported, sold, exchanged, prepared and returned to the ecological system through composting and nutrient cycling.
A region could grow enormous quantities of grain, for example, but without local milling capacity it may still depend upon distant infrastructure before that grain becomes food people can actually use. Local growers may have abundant produce but lack appropriate markets or distribution systems through which to reach nearby households.
Building local food resilience therefore means thinking about the entire ecosystem surrounding food. Community kitchens, food cooperatives, farmers’ markets, local processors, seed libraries, tool libraries, composting networks, food forests, community-supported agriculture and shared storage facilities can all become pieces of regional food infrastructure.
Importantly, communities don’t necessarily have to create all of these resources individually. One of the great opportunities of localisation is sharing what we already have.
Land can be shared with people who want to grow but don’t have access to a garden. Equipment can be shared between growers. Seeds can circulate through local networks. People with gardening knowledge can teach others. Surplus produce can be exchanged or redistributed. Community organisations and councils can make underused land available for food production.
Resilience emerges not simply from possessing more resources, but from creating stronger relationships between them.
Permaculture is about much more than gardening
This relational way of thinking also helps explain one of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of permaculture.
For many people, permaculture has become synonymous with organic gardening: vegetable beds, composting, companion planting, food forests and perhaps a few chickens.
But permaculture is fundamentally a design approach.
The same principles used to understand relationships within an ecological garden can be applied to communities, organisations and economies. Instead of treating each component of a system separately, permaculture asks how those components can support one another.
Waste from one process can become an input for another. Diversity can make systems more resilient. Resources can perform multiple functions. Solutions can be designed around local conditions rather than imposed uniformly. Relationships and feedback become just as important as individual components.
Seen this way, a local food system itself becomes a permaculture design challenge. The question isn’t simply how we grow more vegetables. It is how growers, households, businesses, councils, community organisations, land, water, seeds, knowledge, waste and infrastructure can be connected in ways that strengthen the whole system.
Grassroots action and government need each other
There is a tendency within social change movements to imagine transformation as either bottom-up or top-down. Either communities build alternatives themselves, or governments change policies and institutions.
Food systems demonstrate why we need both.
Grassroots initiatives can experiment with new ways of growing, sharing and organising food. They can build relationships, preserve local knowledge and demonstrate that alternatives are possible. But they also operate within structures shaped by planning rules, land ownership, public infrastructure, procurement policies and funding decisions.
Local governments therefore have considerable potential to strengthen — or constrain — food resilience. Councils can support community gardens and food forests, protect productive agricultural land from inappropriate development, incorporate food resilience into planning, make public land available for community use, support farmers’ markets and local procurement, and help connect growers with community organisations.
The most powerful changes may happen where these two levels meet: where grassroots knowledge and organising are combined with the resources and institutional capacity of local government.
Rather than governments simply delivering food policies to communities, communities can become active participants in designing the food systems they want.
Localising food also means rebuilding community
Perhaps one of the most important insights from Robina’s work is that food localisation isn’t only about food.
When people grow food together, exchange seeds, preserve harvests, share equipment or buy directly from local farmers, something else happens. Relationships form.
People learn who grows their food. Knowledge moves between generations. Neighbours who might otherwise have little reason to interact begin helping one another. Communities develop practical skills and resources they can draw upon during crises.
This creates a form of resilience that cannot easily be measured by tonnes of produce alone.
The globalised food system has delivered extraordinary convenience, but it has also contributed to separating many of us from the ecological and social relationships behind what we eat. Food arrives packaged on supermarket shelves, largely disconnected from soil, season, farmer and place.
Localisation can help make those relationships visible again.
Building the food systems we want
Transforming the food system can feel impossibly large. Most individuals cannot change agricultural policy, corporate concentration or global supply chains on their own. But one of the strengths of a bioregional approach is that it gives us a more tangible scale at which to begin.
We can ask: What would it take for the place where I live to become more food resilient?
The answer will be different everywhere. It might mean establishing a seed library, joining a community-supported agriculture scheme, turning unused public land into food gardens, protecting peri-urban farmland, creating local processing infrastructure, supporting Indigenous food knowledge, connecting schools with growers, establishing food cooperatives or simply learning how to grow some of our own food.
None of these initiatives alone creates food sovereignty. But together they begin rebuilding the relationships, knowledge and infrastructure upon which sovereignty becomes possible.
And this is ultimately what makes local food systems relevant to conversations about building a new economy. They invite us to rethink what an economy is for. Instead of organising food primarily around extracting maximum financial value from land, labour and commodities, we can design systems around nourishing people, regenerating ecosystems and strengthening communities.
The question isn’t simply whether there will be enough food on supermarket shelves tomorrow. It is whether we can build food systems capable of caring for people and place for generations to come — and whether communities themselves will have the knowledge, relationships and power to shape them.
