Growing food at home can strengthen connection and awareness, but national food security depends on far more than backyard gardens alone.
The latest happenings in global activities (politics and the Strait of Hormuz) sees us once again faced with the very probable, likely-to-materialise issue of food security. We last encountered this during the global COVID-19 pandemic, where logistics ground to a halt and being located at the bottom of the Earth was both a blessing and a curse.
As a nation that generates wealth through growing food and fibre why are we so food insecure?
Food security has many different layers and aspects, too many to unpack here. But a handful of conversations keep re-occurring every time there’s a glitch in the global supply chain.
First up, we have rolled out with regular monotony the well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed advice of having vegetable gardens as the solution to food security. Now, I have lots of colleagues, friends, and whanau who grow food, forage, and even hunt, and I love that they do this (and especially when they share it – looking at the paua in my freezer).
But DIY food security isn’t a feasible nation-wide solution. I’ll resist going into depth on why, but a good summary of this is described by Dr Bex on Social Issues in Aotearoa. Essentially, growing food (unless you are a farmer/grower and this is your business, or you own a decent amount of available land) is the domain of the already secure, because they have land and time. Even if you are growing part of your nutritional requirements, it is not a scalable strategy for combatting national levels of food and nutrition hardships.
Food security and food hardships seem ridiculous in a place like Aotearoa New Zealand, because we literally make a big chunk of our money (GDP) by converting sunlight and water via soil mediated processes into milk solids, selected proteins, some fruits, and non-edible plant materials. We are good at doing this, and the money then goes into buy things like medicines, building materials, and other items that we can’t produce ourselves but that we need to function as a society.
Urban fruit and vegetable market, Rotorua. Stock photo
So why can’t we buy straight from the farm gates? Why can’t farmers sell straight to the public so that, we the consumers, bypass the supermarket duopoly? And why on earth is it cheaper to buy butter made in the United States?
Let me address the first question – if you live in a place where there are weekend farmers markets and you can afford them, then yes, you can buy local. But these are usually in areas where food security is not a widespread concern. If food security was a concern in these areas, demand would very quickly outstrip supply. Conversely, if every farmer set up shop in the town or city nearest to them, it would be difficult to find enough buyers on the scale that farmers currently produce goods, and the offerings would be very restricted to select milk products, beef, lamb, wine, kiwifruit, honey and some seafood. Sounds like an appealing grocery shop, right?
Growers produce these specialty products at large scales for international markets, not for local markets. Thus, we as locals are competing against the highest international bidder and because there are increasingly high input costs to produce these, such as energy and fertilizer. Strong export competition means we as consumers pay global market rates and as a nation that is focused on the international market (as opposed to the United States, which focuses on their domestic market), the domestic consumers (aka us) are competing against the rest of the world for our best products. And whatever our government could offer in subsidies would be inconsequential compared to what Londoners would be willing to pay for our lamb.
We are increasingly becoming locked in a cycle of producing limited types of commodities/ingredients for other international businesses to add value. This has its risks, like losing iconic brands such as Anchor, and dairy farmers becoming dependent on the strategies of other overseas businesses. We are also no longer in control of distribution. Most of us get our foods from the supermarket duopoly, the Australian-owned Woolworths and the New Zealand co-operative Foodstuffs. These are a part of international retail chains that buy our food and sell it back to us at a price determined by desired profit margins. Having our food supply dictated by international forces is not only dangerous to food security but also to our environment. After all, it’s not in a multinational company’s best financial interest to bother about protecting the resilience of any one country’s environment when they are in the business of extraction.
What can we do? Or what should we do?
Professor Amanda Black with Dr Alexa Byers and PhD candidate Mesu Tora on taro plantation in Fiji.
The first, best step, as is often the case, is to focus on protecting our environment. Continuing to produce quality food for international markets while also accommodating local need is dependent on maintaining a healthy and resilient environment. The environment is the bedrock of any agricultural system. If we continue to produce food beyond the system’s ability to recover, we will start to lose both economic security and food security. Focusing on working within the resilience of our systems will build secure, lasting food producing systems for both purposes. Creating these kinds of systems will only be possible if we have equally resilient policies and legislation backed by research to protect our land and waters.
We need to rebuild our relationship (and social contracts) with our environment and communities. We need to work towards balancing our need to generate income through selling ingredients to indifferent international markets with our need for accessible food and nutrition that will benefit our communities.
Building a system that is balanced needs to happen on a scale that is achievable. If it’s too small, it will be difficult to gain momentum. Too large and the risks of missing key connections increase. Working at local and regional scales, we can meaningfully pursue food security and include the groups that are critical to have at the table.
