In July 2012, we — the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance — decided to do something both bold and innovative and develop our own food plan in response to the federal government’s National Food Plan Green Paper.
Stimulating our initiative was the government green paper’s heavy bias towards corporate agribusiness, large-scale food manufacturing, big retailing interests and a flawed public consultation process. We knew these things did not truly represent the aspiration of ordinary Australians nor would they move the nation towards securing its supply of basic, essential foods and creating opportunity for smaller businesses and farmers, entrepreneurs and community initiatives in food systems.
We called our policy directions document the Peoples’ Food Plan because, in contrast to the government, our’s would be developed as an authentically open, inclusive and democratic document reflecting the aspirations of eaters, farmers, community organisations, small to medium size food businesses and nutritional, health and other advocacy organisations.
The AFSA drew upon the Canadian People’s Food Policy Project produced between 2009-2011 to write what would be Australia’s first crowdsourced policy directions document.
Download the associated documents and read more about the entire process here.