The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is a farmer-led civil society organisation of people working together to achieve food sovereignty through establishing socially-just and ecologically-sound food and agriculture systems that foster the democratic participation of Indigenous Peoples, smallholders, and local communities in decision making processes.

In 2019 AFSA’s groundbreaking book, Farming Democracy, aimed to share this vision towards food sovereignty with the world. It presented people with the problems we face under capitalism and industrialised agriculture, and introduced them to new concepts like food sovereignty and agroecology through the wisdom of farmers sharing their story. Now, it’s time for AFSA to release ‘Eating Democracy’, a book that will shed light on the changing landscape of eaters led by the principles of food sovereignty.

This Eating Democracy survey  is for Eaters (that’s everyone, right?!). We've tried to keep it short and to the point and it should only take around 10 minutes to complete.

The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is dedicated to the democratic participation of all people in the food we choose to grow and eat. This survey is being run in collaboration with a number of our allies across the Australian food system. Results of this research will be shared with our ally organisations and used to inform AFSA’s strategic direction. We will present results from our research findings at the Australian Food Sovereignty Convergence in October 2022.

The past few years we have had the opportunity to reflect, as a nation, on the recent shocks of drought, bushfire, floods and a global pandemic. The monumental global shift caused wide-ranging, rapidly-unfolding, unprecedented impacts, from the closure of food businesses, to restricted movement of people and freight, reduced production capacity, empty supermarket shelves and looming labour shortages.

We want to understand how eaters across Australia weather the storms, and how they managed to feed themselves, their families and possibly their communities, starting with research, and then we want to share the stories of recognisable and ordinary Australians.

Our plan is to publish highlights from this research, along with more detailed information from further research into a book, Eating Democracy, which will be published in 2023.

So, please tell us about how you eat and how this might have changed over the past few years with the challenges at hand.