If New Zealand is ever to have a national food strategy, it will need a champion to drive it from being a concept to reality. That champion will probably have to come from central government, Te Whare Wānaka o Aoraki Lincoln University’s Professor Alan Renwick said.
Calls for a national food strategy have been around for a few years and while the previous government had shown enthusiasm, it had not moved beyond being just an idea.
One hurdle the strategy faced was who would have responsibility for it, given that for it to work it would have to encompass central government, consumers and food producers.
This is why a champion is needed, he said.
“It would need to come from government. You can have grass roots, but they can only do so much.
“If we are going to have a food strategy, it’s got it fit in with government policy for food.”
The strategy would encompass both food affordability and availability in a climate affected world – while simultaneously not interfering with exports.
The strategy cannot trade one of these off against the other, he said.
“We need to have a holistic view of the whole food system, the environment, the economics, the social and the health, thinking about what is it that we want from our food system and how can we make sure that our policies in what we do are coordinated around that.”
Another issue is finding a solution to food affordability where so much of the food that is crown has its price set by the export market and was hard to influence.
There were other solutions such as revisiting the debate over whether GST on food could be removed.
Renwick described the current situation in NZ as a “food system in disarray”.
“We have major challenges with waste – up to one-third of the food we’re producing is not being consumed. This, coupled with a food system incurring high input costs, means we are using costly resources to produce food that is thrown away.”
There is a need to address both productivity and profitability. The country’s productivity growth rates have declined since 2000, with the primary sector unable to produce more with the same or fewer inputs.
The sector is also struggling with profitability, with the relative price of inputs often rising faster than outputs.
The rise in food inflation in New Zealand since 2021 has resulted in further challenges for families who were already food insecure.
“A World Vision study showed that our price spike was higher and slower to come down than other countries’. We need to understand how our food system and supply chains differ from other countries. Is it that supermarkets have too little competition?
“Is it a consequence of our export-focused primary production that is detrimental to our food supply?”
There are also tensions between the importance of exporting primary produce and an increasing call for greater availability of locally grown food to consumers.
The first step in forming a strategy comes from building a more resilient system.
This could come from diversifying systems and moving away from the current model of specialisation that has made New Zealand more vulnerable, particularly to extreme weather events such as Cyclone Gabrielle.
When that weather event hit, 30% of fruit and vegetable production in one area was impacted. It raised the question of whether we should consider diversifying where New Zealand grows its food, the type of food that is produced and where it is exported to.
This would build the country’s level of resilience.
However, bringing that down to a farmer level where farmers make decisions inside the farm gate where economic returns are a major driving force was the challenge, he said.
“It’s not just going to happen. They need the right signals to make it happen.”
