Children are malnourished, living off cereal and missing school “because their bellies are empty” as a worsening food insecurity crisis grips Western Australia’s most disadvantaged community, local leaders in the East Kimberley say.

Dilly Butters, a mother of five living in Halls Creek, said children were skipping meals every day because families could not afford to shop at the only supermarket. One steak could cost as much as $25, watermelon cost up to $20 and a dozen eggs sold for about $13, she said.

“The shire is trying to build a community grocery store, but we cannot afford to do it ourselves,” she said. “We’re getting desperate.”

The Halls Creek shire council wrote to the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, last week, the day before the federal government released a national strategy to shore up food security in remote Australia, calling for “immediate and coordinated action from all levels of government” to address an “escalating food insecurity crisis” in the community.

Among its demands is funding to support the building of a community-owned grocery store. The shire president, Malcolm Edwards, said the council had spent four years trying to attract a business partner to design, build and run a store, with no success.

In his letter to Albanese, Edwards wrote that the shire only had 21 residential ratepayers and could not fund the construction of a store on its own. He asked the federal government to pay for its construction, in the hope that a community-controlled organisation could then take over operations.

The chief executive of Halls Creek shire council, Susan Leonard, told Guardian Australia a store would “provide people with an opportunity to access different kinds of food and it would create more jobs”.

“In a community that has very high unemployment, it can be a catalyst for change,” she said.

A spokesperson for the National  Agency told Guardian Australia it had not received an application for funding to build a community-run store in Halls Creek but was happy to meet with the shire.

They added that the 10-year remote Indigenous food security strategy “aims to make structural changes to the food system within remote communities nationally, including in the East Kimberley region”. The strategy includes setting up a governing body with federal, state and territory officials as well as community-controlled organisations, with the aim of improving supply chains, ensuring access to traditional foods and boosting local knowledge of health and nutrition.



It follows a pledge to spend $50m on subsidies to match the cost of 30 essential grocery items to city prices at about 150 remote stores, which are yet to be identified.

Half of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households in remote Australia , the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health survey found.

Peak Indigenous health bodies broadly welcomed the strategy.














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