Families' demand for food relief at record levels in New Zealand

Wednesday, 8 February 2023

Will Stovall, left, Gabi Melo, Lou Norling and Ann Martin of Kai Rescue with boxes of food in Nelson. (File photo)

Iain Lees-Galloway is engagement and partnerships lead at the Aotearoa Food Rescue Alliance.

OPINION: As the fireworks crackled the new year in, we earnestly hoped that crises and disasters would be behind us for a while. We knew 2023 would be tough economically. Wouldn’t it be nice to just worry about getting through that without pandemic lockdowns or natural disasters? Unfortunately, nature doesn’t work that way, especially with our changing climate.

Even before the images of devastation poured out of Tāmaki Makaurau, other parts of the upper North Island had already experienced extreme weather events causing evacuations and extensive damage to infrastructure. Our resilience is constantly tested these days.

A key component of resilient communities is the ability to get food to people in times of need. The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that came with it revealed the importance of locally connected food relief and food rescue organisations – established operations that divert good, nutritious food from waste and get it onto the tables of people who need it. The Government wisely made extensive use of Aotearoa’s food rescue network to make sure people were fed. It was a well co-ordinated response to an urgent need.

Kate Parker lives in a small section of an urban area but manages to produce up to 90% of her family's fruit and vegetables intake.

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Our network of food rescue organisations is a vital piece of crisis response infrastructure. They are deeply connected to their communities with established relationships to service and support providers like the Women’s Refuge, local schools and foodbanks. When disruption occurs, they are ready to step up. Gisborne’s Gizzy Kai Rescue and Hastings’ Nourished for Nil played an immediate role in ensuring that people received good nutritious food after the region was hit with extreme weather and flooding in 2022.

Kaivolution in Hamilton is one of many food rescue operations in New Zealand.

West Auckland’s Fair Food did the same during the Auckland floods in January 2023. All local food rescue and food relief organisations were an active part of these disaster responses.

In Auckland, flooded supermarkets had to close for several days. A lot of their stock was damaged and food made inedible. But there was also plenty of good, fresh food that might have gone to waste while the stores were closed to customers. Instead, supermarkets were able to work with food rescue partners like KiwiHarvest to get that nourishing food out of the flooded stores and distributed to people who could otherwise have gone hungry.

Sunday Blessings provided hundreds of food parcels and hot meals in central Auckland including to the community of unhoused people. Many food rescue organisations also provide, or work alongside, wrap-around services that can address the ongoing issues of food insecurity and food poverty.

Food rescue is a sector with over 4000 volunteers distributing kai to over 1000 community organisations and tens of thousands of individuals across the country. It moves thousands of tonnes of food a month – good, nutritious food that would otherwise be wasting in landfill.

For these non-profit charitable organisations to do their amazing work in times of extreme need, they must be viable 100% of the time. You can’t just step up a food rescue operation from scratch in response to a disaster. The Government recognised this during the Covid-19 response and funded food rescue organisations to provide this vital service.

But now that funding tied to the pandemic response is ending, there is no guarantee that financial support will continue. In fact it looks likely that it won’t.

Demand for food relief is at record levels. We’re all experiencing the pain of rising food prices. For many families, food costs have gone beyond what they can cope with. More and more working families are queuing up at foodbanks and free stores.

Many are doing it for the first time in their lives. Most believed they would never have to. Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is focussed on the ‘here-and-now’ and on ‘bread-and-butter’ issues. That’s exactly what the food rescue sector is doing: making sure people have bread, butter and some fresh fruit and vegetables too.

A recent study initiated by the Aotearoa Food Rescue Alliance showed, conservatively, that for every $1 invested in food rescue, $4.50 worth of social value is returned. That’s a great investment for anyone funding food rescue. The sector doesn’t want the Government to fund everything they do. There will always be a role for sponsors and donors.

But secure Government funding releases organisations to get on with their work. Right now, that's what they need to be doing – feeding the growing number of people going hungry in New Zealand.

Food rescue is responding to the cost of living crisis. It’s responding to climate change by keeping methane-producing food waste out of landfills. And it's ready and able to respond to pandemics, fires, floods and earthquakes whenever such disasters beset us. The Government needs to invest in proven local solutions that meet local needs – so we can build community resilience and get help to those who need it, when they need it.