The Austin Environmental Commission on Wednesday approved a recommendation to the City Council to adopt the proposed Austin/Travis County Food Plan and ensure its full funding over the next four years.

The resolution, introduced by Mariana Krueger and adopted unanimously, also called for the allocation of a “significant amount of resources” in the new state budget, which comes into force on October 1.

The council will begin adopting the budget on August 14 and is expected to consider approving the food plan at its meeting on August 29. Council members were informed of the proposed plan in July.

In presenting the plan to commissioners, Angela Baucom, food and climate coordinator for the city’s sustainability office, provided some background, noting that a report on the state of the food system prepared by her office several years ago highlighted “some troubling issues with our local food system.”

Particularly disturbing was the discovery that less than one percent of the food consumed in Austin and Travis County is produced locally.

“This is a problem because it shows that we are not investing in the local food system as much as we could,” Baucom said. “Our food comes from outside our region, which of course represents a less sustainable transportation process.”

The need for locally produced food was greatest during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, which exposed the severity of food shortages in Austin.

“The food system in our area lasts about three days at any given time,” Baucom said. “This is simply unsustainable, especially in circumstances like the winter storm when our residents are without power and access to transportation for extended periods of time.”

Baucom also identified contradictions within the local food system: In Austin and Travis County, about 500,000 kilograms of food are wasted every day, while 14 percent of the local population suffers from food insecurity.

“That number should not be mentioned in any sentence,” she said. “We want to find out why so much food is wasted and ends up in our garbage and wreaking havoc in our landfills, while there are people who have nothing to eat.”

When food rots in a local landfill, it creates harmful greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane, Baucom said.

“Getting food waste out of our landfills is as big a priority as getting it into the hands of people who can use it – either through human consumption or by using the waste as compost that could benefit the food system.

Other worrying signs will persist until the government takes action. The food plan recommends making land purchases for agricultural use while the market currently favors buyers.

“We are seeing a tremendous loss of agricultural land in our area. In Travis County, an average of more than 16 acres are lost every day,” Baucom noted.

Another pressing problem is food inequality along racial lines in the Eastern Crescent, Baucom said.

“We can compare the geography of our grocery stores to the geography where we have a higher concentration of black and Latino residents.” These are the areas where there has not been enough investment in infrastructure to accommodate full-line grocery stores, she said.

However, displacement often occurs when new infrastructure is built in a community.

“We recognize that some of these demographic changes only begin when a HEB comes to a neighborhood, and that is no coincidence,” Baucom said.

“So when we seek improvements in areas where we know there are income and racial disparities, … the goal is to work with communities to ensure that residents are not displaced as improvements are made in their communities,” she said.

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