Region. Food production under threat

The NSW Government's metropolitan strategy barely acknowledged food production in the Sydney Basin, allowing development to gobble up farms despite the need for sustainable agriculture to deal with climate change, according to Professor Bill Bellotti, who holds the Vincent Fairfax Chair in Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development at the University of Western Sydney. Under the strategy, about half the current food production in the city's south-west and north-west, including vegetables grown in greenhouses around Liverpool and the Hawkesbury, would disappear. Professor Bellotti will deliver his findings at a UWS conference on Sydney's conflict between food and land hunger, at the Hawkesbury campus, on Thursday.