Keywords

Food Pricing and Security in Remote Indigenous Australia

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived on Australian shores, measures were quickly enacted to protect the Indigenous residents of remote regions whose poor health status rendered them particularly vulnerable to the disease (Keene, 2020). In late March 2020, remote communities were declared restricted zones under the Biosecurity Act 2015 (Cth), with entry only allowed for those delivering essential services including food. In early April 2020, a Food Security Working Group was established by the Australian government. And then in May 2020, the Minister for Indigenous Australians established a parliamentary inquiry into food pricing and food security in remote Indigenous communities. We both provided submissions to this inquiry (Altman, 2020; Markham & Kerins, 2020). At the same time as these Indigenous-specific actions were being implemented, broader measures were introduced to bolster the livelihood circumstances of all Australians who were economically impacted by the lockdowns that have become an enduring feature of Australia’s effort to manage the spread of the virus. Of relevance to this essay was the introduction of a coronavirus income supplement to all unemployed Australians, among whom Indigenous Australians are disproportionately represented. This one measure effectively doubled the income of 38 per cent of Indigenous people (Markham et al., 2020, p. 6). Further, with lockdown, mutual obligation “work for the dole” requirements were relaxed as a social-distancing measure. This was especially relevant for remote-living Indigenous Australians, as their income support was conditional on extremely onerous work-for-the-dole requirements, with harsh financial penalties for non-compliance (Staines et al., 2021, pp. 10–12).

In December 2020, the Report Food Pricing and Food Security in Remote Indigenous Communities (Commonwealth of Australia, 2020) was released. It found that food costs are very high in many remote communities, reinforcing long-held concerns regarding food security for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, many of whom live in deep poverty. Such concerns had been articulated by several government inquiries in the last decade (Fredericks & Bradfield, 2021) and had even been the subject of a now defunct National Strategy for Food Security in Remote Indigenous Communities, introduced by the Council of Australian Governments in 2009 as an element of its Closing the Gap policy framework. But the report found no evidence of systemic price-gouging taking place in remote community stores, nor of significant food shortages—concerns that had triggered the parliamentary inquiry. Optimistically the parliamentary committee noted the positive impacts of two new institutions, the Food Security Working Group and the Supermarket Taskforce, established in 2020 in response to the pandemic.

The report’s 16 recommendations focused on technical and surveillance interventions that the committee expected would apply downward pressure on food prices at remote stores and ensure that healthy fresh foods were available. Only one recommendation referred to the need for locally sourced food, focusing on local commercial market gardens and animal husbandry rather than fishing and wild harvesting of bush foods, at which many Indigenous people are especially adept. There was no serious engagement by the parliamentary committee with two key issues that we raised in our submissions (two of 126 received), based on community-based research on economic well-being in remote Indigenous communities. First, given the workings of supply chain capitalism, food prices in remote stores inevitably will be high. The payment of the Coronavirus Supplement in 2020 provided a natural experiment on how the alleviation of deep poverty might enhance food security in a context where food prices are high. Second, institutional arrangements like mutual obligation limited opportunities for self-provisioning. The liberation of the unemployed from mutual-obligation requirements, combined with extra income, allowed some people to visit their customary lands and engage in self-provisioning. It is these two forms of livelihood and well-being reprieve during the early days of the pandemic disruption that we explore in this essay.

Long Supply Chain: Expensive Food and Low Incomes

Remote and very remote Australia as officially classified today accounts for 86 per cent of the Australian continent; this classification clearly demonstrates a dominant market-capitalist and settler-state perspective from the highly urbanized, densely settled parts of Australia. The dots on the map are discrete Indigenous communities, so termed for demographic (most residents are Indigenous) and historical (most of the larger places were colonial settlements; the small ones are more recently re-established homelands) reasons. There are about 1000 discrete Indigenous communities with a population of about 90,000–100,000 people (10 per cent non-Indigenous), serviced by 200 community stores. While most of the small communities have no store, a few of the larger ones have more than one. Much of this information is cartographically depicted in Fig. 10.1.

Fig. 10.1
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Discrete Indigenous communities in remote Australia

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People in these communities live at the end of long distribution and, more importantly, fragile supply chains, whether their store food originates in Australia or overseas. It is inevitable that 1000 discrete Indigenous communities in tropical and desert Australia will experience supply chain challenges. Indeed, it is remarkable that fresh and processed foods routinely reach these extraordinarily remote places by road, sea and air delivery, especially when the rugged terrain and extreme seasonality and associated periodic isolation of many places are considered.

The small size of communities eliminates access to supermarket chains and oligopoly wholesale outlets. Inevitably, food supply comes at a high price, something that has been recognized and clearly documented for decades now, most regularly by the Northern Territory Market Basket Survey, conducted every two years for the past two decades. Small markets and limited buying power, lack of retail competition, high freight and associated cool-storage costs all add up: that is the way market capitalism works. Numerous reviews that we refer to in our submissions indicate that a “healthy” food basket costs 20–60 per cent more in remote Indigenous situations and 60–68 per cent more using point-of-sale data at 20 remote stores.

One broad response to this situation is to reduce the cost of store-purchased food, as in the parliamentary committee’s recommendations, which look to lower prices through price monitoring, infrastructure improvements and other technical interventions into store and supply chain management. This mirrors the approach generally taken in the public health literature on food-security interventions. The other, which we favour, is to raise cash income levels in remote communities to allow for the purchase of food at what are inevitably higher prices.

Most Indigenous people in very remote Australia (53 per cent) live below the poverty line (Markham & Biddle, 2018). This rate has increased significantly between 2006 and 2016. This is partly explained by an increase in Indigenous unemployment: in very remote Australia the Indigenous employment rate declined from nearly 50 per cent to 30 per cent between 2006 and 2016; it is the lowest in the country. The prevalence of remote Indigenous poverty is the single greatest contributor to food insecurity. The Australian Bureau of Statistics National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey (ABS, 2019) asked participants if they ran out of food and were unable to buy more in the past twelve months. In very remote Australia, 43 per cent of Indigenous people reported experiencing such food insecurity in 2018–2019. In a submission to another parliamentary inquiry and using the best available epidemiological evidence, we noted that a combination of low income, limited choice and high food prices is literally killing Indigenous Australians (Markham & Altman, 2019).

During the first year of the pandemic, as a series of supplements were paid to the unemployed, declining from $550 per fortnight (April–September 2020) to $150 per fortnight (1 January 2021–31 March 2021) before ending (Staines et al., 2021, p. 13). These supplements resulted in dramatic decreases in Indigenous poverty and markedly enhanced food purchases. For example, Outback Stores (2020), a publicly owned remote community store management corporation, reported a 75–100 per cent increase in sales between April and June 2020. The Arnhem Land Progress Aboriginal Corporation (2020), an Indigenous-owned corporation, reported that retail sales increased by 200–300 per cent over the same period.

The COVID disruption provided a rare form of social experimentation that is only possible during exceptional times. The raising of incomes for all by as much as 26 per cent not only offset the high price of purchased food for a time but simultaneously allowed Australia to start to address its international commitments to eliminate poverty and hunger by 2030 in accord with Sustainable Development Goals 1 and 2 of the UN Global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

There are two starkly contrasting views here. The parliamentary inquiry focused on issues of competition and price monitoring, transport and refrigeration infrastructure, and store regulation and monitoring. In short, the inquiry’s considered view of poverty and hunger in remote Indigenous communities exhibited a concentrated technical focus on the supply chain. We, on the other hand, use information from the COVID income-supplementation period to highlight the inadequacy of social-security payments that include a Remote Area Allowance that still fails to reflect the higher cost of living in remote Australia. After a six-month period of the gradual tapering down of the COVID supplement, the JobSeeker rate was increased by only $50 per fortnight from 1 April 2021. The experiment of poverty alleviation is now over, and the majority of remote-living Indigenous Australians have now returned to a life of food insecurity, living at the end of the global food supply chain.

Short Supply Chains: Self-Provisioning

In precolonial times, Indigenous people everywhere in Australia exercised food sovereignty and enjoyed diverse forms of self-sufficiency by utilizing the natural environment and its resources. This mode of production was disrupted by colonization, dispossession and settler-state domination that only occurred in some of the remotest parts of the continent after the Second World War. The transformation from self-provisioning societies to the income poverty and high levels of dependence on store-bought foods evident today involved extremely complex processes: we can explore such processes in only a cursory manner here.

There is limited empirical information about the extent of Indigenous people’s self-provisioning across the more than 6 million square kilometres of Australia we now term remote and very remote. The information that is available and summarized by Buchanan (2014) and Ferguson et al. (2017) indicates that contemporary self-provisioning occurs at varying levels of significance. Statistics from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey that we summarized (Altman, 2020; Markham & Kerins, 2020) indicate that between 72 per cent of adults in remote Australia in 2008 and 79 per cent in 2014 reported participation in some hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild foods. While the survey data on participation is far from comprehensive, it is unlikely that such high levels of effort were undertaken without reward.

Despite the numbers, there is an escalating government project to impose a market mentality on remote-living Indigenous people. This project is ideologically underpinned by what Martin and Yanagisako (2020) have identified as a modernist teleological vision of a future in which wage labour would expand across the world. Hence, the coercive policy of punitive workfare for the unemployed aims to prepare them for paid employment even in situations where employment opportunities are deficient or absent, and labour migration is not countenanced as an option by most unemployed.

To challenge and potentially upend the dominant discourse promoting market capitalism as the only means for poverty alleviation and food security in remote Australia, we propose an alternate Indigenous perspective: hunting and harvesting of naturally occurring foods as a form of self-provisioning, sometimes referred to as food sovereignty. Our proposal is not for some return to pre-colonial subsistence living but rather for an enhancement of livelihoods, especially for the unemployed, who might be well placed to supplement store-purchased foods with self-provisioning.

In Fig. 10.2, we illustrate the extent of Indigenous landholdings in a Western legal sense, following land rights and native title reparation processes since the 1970s. This is a map that we have developed and updated on several occasions since 2015 (Altman & Markham, 2015). The totality of these holdings, sometimes referred to as “the Indigenous estate”, covers more than half of remote and very remote Australia, comprising 4 million square kilometres. In terms of the supply chain heuristic examined in this book, the map highlights the proximity of discrete Indigenous communities and resident landowners to sources of naturally occurring foods rather than remoteness and transport challenges for accessing purchased food.

Fig. 10.2
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The Indigenous estate and discrete Indigenous communities

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What is especially significant is that native title law confers a set of rights and interests on Indigenous landowners that include the right to hunt, fish and forage on the land and waters; have access to and use of the natural waters of the land; and have a right to share or exchange subsistence and other traditional resources obtained on or from the land. While the law stipulates at section 211(2) of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) that such rights are limited to satisfying the personal, domestic or non-commercial communal needs of native-title holders, the distinction between commercial and non-commercial is an arbitrary colonial imposition that Indigenous people constantly challenge. To secure such rights and interests, a claimant must prove continuity of custom and tradition that is everywhere inclusive of animals, plants and other natural resources. This is an extraordinary resource right over a massive Indigenous jurisdiction. Hence, our use of the term “food sovereignty” is not speculative or conceptual. Rather, we recognize that Indigenous groups retain sovereign and legally recognized rights to lands and the food sources they provide on a continental scale.

COVID-19 policy shifts from April 2020 saw a punitive social-security approach suspended to facilitate social distancing. Although conducting research based on direct observation has been impossible because of lockdowns and the operation of biosecurity laws, there has been indirect evidence that both the Coronavirus Supplement and the suspension of mutual obligations have had positive impacts on self-provisioning for two main reasons.

First, as Markham and Altman (2019) have quantitatively demonstrated, the imposition of financial penalties for breaching mutual obligations reduced the incomes of the unemployed by an estimated 6 per cent. Such penalties further impoverished those already living below the poverty line. The suspension of mutual obligations and penalties would have conversely lifted people’s incomes by this amount alongside the Coronavirus Supplement.

Second, as the unemployed were freed from mutual obligation requirements that required the able bodied to turn up for make-work and training daily for at least four hours under the Community Development Programme, they were able to visit, and in some cases, move back to, their customary lands to self-provision. Available qualitative research summarized by Staines et al. (2021, pp. 14–15) indicates that with additional income and available time, people were able to visit their Country and participate in hunting and gathering activities. Smith et al. (2020), working in the Northern Territory, report that “more people are going out camping and fishing … eating that bush tucker again … looking more healthy” and getting “away from the worries of town”. In Arnhem Land, it was reported that people were returning to their Country to live in less crowded and healthier housing and source and eat bush foods (Altman, 2020).

In short, we argue that the perceived food security “crisis” in remote indigenous Australia is in large measure an artefact of pre-pandemic government policies that invariably impoverish the disproportionately high number of Indigenous unemployed. Such impoverishment can be offset in part by activating local and regional food supply chains. As the unemployed enjoyed more income and freedom in 2020, there was enhanced self-provisioning. Alongside enhanced purchase of food from stores, additional income allowed the purchase of essential equipment, including transport, needed today to exercise food sovereignty. Activating adjacent local and regional supply chains of naturally occurring foods can partly offset the high cost of purchased food at the end of long distribution supply chains.

Conclusion: Food and Coronavirus Supply Chains

Anna Tsing (2009) has theorized how the processes of supply chain capitalism create global standardization while generating growing gaps between rich and poor. Here, we have focused on disparities between Indigenous Australians and others, those living in the sparsely populated remote north and centre and those living in the more densely populated south. We show that those living at the very end of global food supply chains are subject to imposed technical solutions to the challenges posed by remoteness, while at the same time the historical and politico-structural circumstances that have created and maintained Indigenous poverty and marginalization are overlooked. The promise of economic salvation is predicated on paid work that does not exist, alongside an enduring myopia about actual livelihood possibilities where people live and can access land and its resources.

Emerging future-focused possibilities for self-provisioning are limited by government policy and escalating impoverishment. In remote Australia, surplus populations are located alongside growing availability of land and natural resources. People in such places have limited prospects for paid work. The social contract with the state sees income support delivered without any compensatory reference to local costs at the end of the global food supply chain. Indeed, the liberal settler state is highly ambiguous as to whether it seeks to make its policies “make live” or “let die” (Li, 2010). At the discursive and performative level, government policy looks to “make live” with cheaper, supposedly healthy store food, but actions to “make live” by increasing incomes or enhancing prospects for food sovereignty are not countenanced. The growing dependence on the store is becoming more and more embedded, while the scope to access legally guaranteed natural resources is rendered next to impossible.

We began our chapter with reference to a parliamentary inquiry urgently convened during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to examine issues of food pricing and food insecurity in remote Indigenous communities. Unsurprisingly, the inquiry reported that food prices for people living at the very end of global food supply chains are high, while poverty means that people experienced high levels of food insecurity. The inquiry recommended technical and regulatory actions to reduce prices at stores. Paradoxically, perhaps, the long and tenuous supply chains had a positive effect in assisting to keep remote Indigenous Australia relatively free of the coronavirus to date, with few infections and deaths in the first year of the pandemic. But the inquiry also opened a Pandora’s box of questions about the many development challenges that remote Indigenous communities face daily. Food security cannot come from the store alone because people do not earn enough to pay for expensive food. So, we contend, either income-support payments need to increase or much more food needs to be derived from self-provisioning in the hinterland, beyond the store and the reach of the state.