Opinion: New Zealand is a country of food producers. We may be a small, isolated nation at the end of the world, but we create an outsized amount of kai, most of it bound for faraway shores.
Each year New Zealand exports enough food to feed 39 million people their daily dairy intake, 12 million their daily meat, seafood and other protein intake, 2 million their daily vegetable intake and 10 million their daily fruit intake.
The complex system behind our food – the interlocking networks that grow food, package it, transport it, sell it, promote it and all the steps in between – is a source of wealth for our country. Via tax, this food system also helps pay for many of the services and infrastructure we need, from hospitals to roads.
However, New Zealand’s food system is also a major contributor to the ill health of New Zealanders.
Poor access to healthy food in the current food system is one of the critical pathways toward poor health outcomes across our population, including an increasing burden of long-term health conditions and poor child health. Long-term conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes are the leading causes of death, illness and disability in Aotearoa New Zealand. Poor diet is linked to the development of these conditions.
The wide availability and accessibility of low-cost, less-healthy food and drinks – and the relatively high cost and restricted availability of healthy alternatives – is contributing to our unbalanced food system. Data from the 2022/23 New Zealand Health Survey found that only 6.7 percent of adults and 4.9 percent of children ate the recommended combined number of servings of fruit and vegetables.
Food insecurity – where people do not have adequate access to safe and nutritious food – is a daily lived reality for many New Zealanders, and its consequences are felt across society.
The impact of ill health arising from our food system also falls unevenly across society, with particularly severe consequences for Māori and Pacific people. Uterine cancer, which is strongly related to obesity, is now the most-diagnosed cancer among Pacific females after breast cancer, with around twice as many Pacific women diagnosed with uterine cancer each year as either lung or colorectal cancer.
Recent modelling suggests the number of New Zealanders with type-2 diabetes will have increased from 220,000 in 2018 to more than 400,000 by 2040. Again, diabetes is strongly linked to diet and access to affordable and nutritious kai, and again the impact falls unevenly on Māori and Pacific people.
In short, the food system we have is very good at producing export quality products that earn a great deal of money. It is not nearly as good at ensuring all New Zealanders have access to the nourishment they need to live and flourish.
Correcting this imbalance is the focus of the Public Health Advisory Committee’s first report, released today, Rebalancing our food system. The report examines the deficiencies of how we produce, distribute and consume food in New Zealand and the approach needed to ensure our food system supports the health and wellbeing of all New Zealanders.
The committee was established in 2022 specifically to examine the long-term health challenges facing New Zealand and advise on innovative and practical solutions. The quality of what we eat and drink is not just a long-term health challenge, it is a fundamental part of culture, whānau and daily life.
When writing the report, we started from the premise that giving people access to affordable and nutritious kai is not just a worthy goal, but a human right. The report takes an unashamedly public health focus, looking at changes that could help improve the health and wellbeing of people of New Zealand, rather than the profitability of food businesses. But we do believe a food system can deliver economic benefits and support the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders. These goals can reinforce and strengthen one another, but the balance needs to shift away from treating food as a commodity and towards treating it as a necessary condition for life.
To shift this balance will require a coordinated collective approach. Strong government leadership is needed, but all parts of the system have a role to play in resetting the values and purpose of our food system.
Children are exposed to unhealthy food and drink marketing more than 68 times a day, which is more than twice the amount of advertising they see for healthy products. This reflects that focus on food as a commodity rather than a right. We need to do more to support healthy food environments for children and young people. Measures including restrictions on the marketing, advertising and sponsorship of unhealthy food and drinks, healthy food and drink policies in schools, and a levy on sugar-sweetened beverages could go a long way to improving tamariki access to safe and nutritious kai and set them up to succeed in life.
The place that we live determines the food we have access to, and our opportunities for involvement in the food system. Decisions taken centrally and locally regarding our food system shape our local environments, from land use to distribution of food outlets. Local communities face barriers to determining their local food environments, these need to be lifted. We need to empower local leaders, including iwi and hapū, local authorities, and communities to have a stronger voice in decisions about access to food.
Māori are more likely to face food insecurity than non-Māori New Zealanders, often as a function of where they live. Supporting the revitalisation of Indigenous Māori food systems and traditional kai knowledge and practices will improve food resilience and reduce food insecurity for Māori and uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Western influences have minimised Māori control over traditional and customary kai sources, kai systems and kai practices. Revitalising Māori food systems and traditional kai knowledge and practices would allow Māori to access, manage, share and produce safe and nourishing food for their communities. Some activities that support this include:
Kaitiakitanga – protecting the environment. By protecting natural resources (the land, freshwater and marine environments), Māori can return to hunting and gathering traditional kai sources, for example eels and puha.
Māra kai – gardening for food. Gardening initiatives in Māori communities enable the transfer of traditional knowledge and practices on how to grow and harvest kai.
Partnering with Māori to create resilient sustainable food systems based on Mātauranga Māori ‘Māori knowledge’.
Central and local government need to work alongside the food industry to encourage voluntary measures to rebalance the food system, but Government must use a backstop of mandatory levers if this voluntary action does not occur or happens too slowly.
Overall, our report makes 13 recommendations, covering five areas where changes now can lead to a healthier future for all New Zealanders. These steps are all achievable and grounded in what has worked elsewhere and in the aspirations of the many people who helped contribute to the report.
Our status as a food-producing nation is rightly celebrated. Our aspiration is to be a country that celebrates not only the wealth derived from its land, but also the health and nourishment it derives for its people.
Kevin Hague chairs the Public Health Advisory Committee, which was established in 2022 and provides independent, expert advice to the Minister of Health, the Public Health Agency, Te Whatu Ora and Te Aka Whai Ora. Other members of the Committee are Beverley Te Huia, Associate-Professor Jason Gurney, Professor Peter Crampton and Associate-Professor Ruth Cunningham.
