The price we pay for food

The price of food just rose again. Stats NZ reports food prices increased 6.8 percent in the year ended February 2022. Compared with February 2021:

• fruit and vegetable prices increased 17 percent

• meat, poultry, and fish prices increased 7.1 percent

• grocery food prices increased 5.4 percent

• non-alcoholic beverage prices increased 2.3 percent

• restaurant meals and ready-to-eat food prices increased 5.2 percent.

The reasons? Covid disrupting global supply chains; extreme weather events disrupting global supply chains; Aotearoa being remote and reliant on shipping for imports (expensive to get here because it’s further); war causing a rise in fuel prices (food is transported by fuel and it becomes more expensive if the cost of fuel is higher); and inflation is on the rise. Also nationally our farmers and growers have borne the brunt of labour shortages due to travel restrictions, and higher costs of operating which affects the price.

A family of four that recently relocated to Aotearoa from Ireland shared with me the pain they felt the first few times they went to the supermarket here in their new country. Pak’n’Save (supposedly the lowest price guaranteed) is twice the price of the middle-of-the-range supermarket they’d normally shop at in Dublin. None of this is new to us kiwis: we ‘get used to it’ — if we can afford to — and shop accordingly. But that doesn’t work for those already at the bottom of the pile. Covid is affecting incomes and jobs, people now sick and taking time off or losing their jobs as a result, despite us having a tight labour market and one of the lowest unemployment rates ever.

Last week I attended the Aotearoa Food Rescue Alliance (AFRA) hui where the Minister for Social Development Hon Carmel Sepuloni reiterated this exact point. War, inflation and covid 19 exacerbate food security issues for families already hit hard and struggling with the cost of living, she explained. Those already feeling the impact will be worse off. All of this highlighting the need for the exceptional work that our food rescue and food distribution agencies are doing to get a phenomenal amount of meals out to people doing it tough right now. In the year January 2021-2022, nationally it’s estimated by AFRA that over 10 million kilograms of food was diverted from landfill and ‘rescued’ to feed people, totally a whopping 29 million meals, with an eye watering $76 million in retail value. It’s serious business with a network of hundreds of rescue agencies and thousands of people — mostly volunteers — working hard to get people fed in this time of need. So what’s going on?

My response to the current discussions on the rising price of food— and the associated heavy leaning we are doing on our charities today to plug the gap — is that this is a complex topic that encompasses far more than price, and it warrants looking further into this complexity.

*Many communities struggle every day to feed themselves, thanks to a broken food system that does not serve them well. It’s broken because they cannot access affordable, nutritious and healthy food. Indigenous cultures continue to suffer the colonial land grabs of centuries past, cutting off their right of access to land and growing food how they should be able to — as their ancestors had. They feel the impacts of pollution by industrial processes on their waterways and oceans once used for traditional hunting, growing and fishing. 

The right to food is a human right, and probably one that we shouldn’t feel like we need to keep debating. The United Nations explains that the human right to food has the elements of accessibility, availability, and adequacy of food –  something different from food sovereignty or food insecurity. This is a right that places obligations on the nation-state to overcome hunger and malnutrition and ensure food for all. It takes the right to people to have food up a notch and puts the onus on the government to ensure it’s happening, which in most countries, it does not. We are far from everyone in our country having the right to food upheld. Let’s get something out of the way: the reason people people are hungry is not because there is not enough food. There is plenty of food. It is just not distributed to all equitably, and there are many reasons for this: war, trade sanctions, greed, the market not working for everyone. Globally there is more than enough. There’s so much food that we waste it. Each country has its own set of circumstances, so it’s difficult to paint a simple solution to complex international problems, but in this country, there is enough food for people and really there are no excuses when it comes to our hungry people.

When we speak about access to food, it’s a complicated topic. It’s more than just being able to go to the supermarket, or afford things when you get there, although that is certainly a part of it. Over the years, I have tried hard to get my head and heart around the complexities, the ironies, and the injustices that come with this part of the food system, and believe me, it doesn’t get easier. It’s the part where your heart drops to your knees because you see kids going to school without lunch and know there won’t be dinner for them when they get home. You feel it for people sleeping in cars in your community and humbly lining up for a rescued food parcel at the food drop. You know the pressures that fall on small and underfunded (mainly volunteer) services stretching themselves to get people fed.

At the same time, it’s where you see the very best in people. Thousands of volunteers and groups are sprinkled across our country working hard to ‘do the right thing’ to get food to families: running pay-as-you-feel restaurants, rescuing and redistributing food, gleaning fields, donating entire cows or redistributing fish to feed families, building networks and communities around gardens and schools, health workers underpaid and overworked trying their hardest to solve our health crisis.*

My caution is that we cannot rely on our charities alone to fill the need and support people doing it tough, while allowing the cost of living (specifically housing and food) to continue to rise without intervention. Leaning too heavily on the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff will not solve the myriad of interconnected problems that cause issues of access to food. It will do the opposite and entrench behaviours, essentially making it OK because we have a thriving charity sector that can help buffer the impact.

© 2022, Emily King, Director and Food Systems Expert at Spira.

Contact us: info@spira.nz

*This is an extract from Emily’s upcoming book: Re-Food, available in 2022.

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