A worker at the Salvation Army's Royal Oak Foodbank. Photo: Salvation Army
New Zealand might be expert at feeding the rest of the world, but it needs to do a better job of providing food to those within its borders, the Salvation Army says.
It has released a new report that shows more than one in four households with children is regularly missing out on the food they need.
"Low incomes and a food system focused on exports are causing ill health and hunger," said report co-author and Salvation Army food security manager Sonya Cameron. "We must put our health and our children's wellbeing ahead of profit."
She said food insecurity for children was at the highest level in 10 years. The report suggested a number of solutions including transforming the grocery commissioner into a food commissioner, focused on enabling local food economies to thrive.
It also proposed the introduction of a national food strategy, and local food systems to restore relationships between mana whenua and traditional food landscapes. It said continued funding was needed to scale up community initiatives.
Free lunches in schools needed to be embedded in the school system, it said, and made widely available to all students potentially impacted by food insecurity.
It also said there should be both taxes on unhealthy food, such as sugar taxes, and work to reduce the cost of healthy food through targeted measures such as tax reductions.
"Ensuring every household has access to a liveable income whether from paid work or income support should not be seen as an expensive social policy 'nice to have', but rather as the cornerstone of demand in a thriving domestic food sector and base for a robust international food export sector."
Cameron said councils should be empowered to regulate local food environments, to improve access to healthy food and reduce unhealthy outlets.
"We have the solutions at our fingertips," she said.
Cameron said a solutions-based approach to the problem of food insecurity meant recognising the urgency of meeting immediate and short-term needs, while wrestling with the longer-term issues.
She said the rate of food insecurity among households with children had almost doubled in the two years to June 2024.
"When we look at our food system, I think that we have spent a lot of effort focused on exporting all our good food.
"And yet we've got 27 percent of our children who are food insecure. It seems to me that … the Ministry for Primary Industries is purely focused on food for export.
"We think that we really need to start rethinking how we look at food, so that rather than just seeing food as a commodity that we're actually focusing on kai as a connector, kai as a human right.
"Are we able to localise our food systems so that our communities are self-sufficient, that they're able to keep the food that they're often growing, producing in their local areas to feed local people. That way we're likely to have much better quality food, rather than the imported and often highly processed food."
She said when small businesses were connected to and caring about the communities they were feeding, it created resiliency and jobs.
Cameron said there was an opportunity to provide food both for the export and domestic market.
"Certainly what we've heard is other countries are looking beyond just farmers and free trade agreements and also looking at how they can support local food systems as well … local procurement systems for example.
"If we were able to be supporting local businesses that were growing food that was then going into, for example, our school lunches or our hospitals and that actually helped support those businesses … the mobile abattoirs or the local mills, you know, that actually help process that sort of food, those are the ways that we could get things up and running that actually help to support our local food systems.
"We prioritise our food exports at what cost … when you look at the fact that, you know, we've got skyrocketing rates of diabetes, we've got children whose educational outcomes are falling behind due to the levels of food and security. At what cost our food exports over our people?"
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