The rural-urban interface is an unsettled border. It is constructed socially, historically, politically and economically, and is fashioned, disguised, heightened or distorted by agency from both sides, and sometimes by agents who seek to segment the population in order to regulate or govern. As a barrier, the interface can be rendered selectively porous, particularly to information and ideas, resulting in contrasting and sometimes contested perceptions on each side.
I want to explore the differentiated rural-urban representations and perceptions of two particular kinds of risk. One is climate change as a risk to grain production in Australia, and the second is the discursively related risk of global food (in)security. A convergence of these two issues occurs within the growing scholarship on the financialisation of agriculture and corporate investment in agrifood value chains. In this presentation I will draw on examples from this body of academic work as well as from policy and media to examine the translation of these two risks across the rural-urban interface. I also discuss the potential for agricultural policy blind spots as the corporate approach to risk management crosses into rural Australia.

In reaction to the first National Food Policy launched by the Australian Labor Party in 2010, people and groups across these various food initiatives established the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. Contrary to the origins of the movement in Latin American where food sovereignty emerged as a vision developed by rural movements of peasants, small farmers, landless and indigenous people as well as agricultural workers, food sovereignty in Australia has thus been mostly an urban and consumer-driven initiative. Tracing the context, emergence and recent development of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, this paper asks the following questions: How has the meaning of food sovereignty been picked up in a context as deeply characterised by market values and rationales as Australia? Have the meanings and interpretations of food sovereignty changed or been adapted within this process, and if so how? And what is the relationship with other food sovereignty movements around the globe, including those in the global south and the global north? By addressing these questions, the paper aims to contribute to the debate about what happens when alternative ideas about the future of agriculture and food – in this case the vision of food sovereignty – travel across space.

Peri-urban areas are the interface between urban and rural regions. Traditionally, land uses in these areas have straddled urban and rural, very often acting as foodbowl for adjacent urban areas. Peri-urban agriculture provides a diverse suite of benefits to the urban areas that it borders. Increasingly, however, peri-urban areas are being converted to residential uses. There are limits to the extent to which peri-urban areas can drift further and further from the city—especially in a topographically constrained city such as Sydney—and thus in some instances these areas are at risk of becoming lost, taking with them the benefits they provide. In Sydney, planning and development has tended to treat peri-urban areas to be ‘suburbs in waiting’—latent land awaiting residential development. Using a Foucauldian governmentality framework, this presentation will discuss analysis of the discursive construction of urban/rural/peri-urban areas in the Sydney context, which reveals an absence of 'peri-urban’ as a distinct type of land use in Sydney, and an ignorance of agricultural land uses in the Sydney Basin. It will be argued that an explicit recognition of the 'peri-urban’ as a distinct category of land-use types could help improve management of peri-urban food production.