EIT Te Pūkenga Policy think tank discusses move to food sovereignty

EIT|Te Pūkenga Māori and Indigenous Research Professor David Tipene-Leach (left) with Senior Researcher Rachael Glassey (middle), Research Professor Boyd Swinburn and Synergia Founding Partner Dr David Rees (back left).

Moving from food security to food sovereignty requires Mātauranga Māori and a renewal of relationships with indigenous food systems, says EIT | Te Pūkenga Māori and Indigenous Research Professor David Tipene-Leach.

David spoke at a Policy Think Tank on Thursday, November 17. The Think Tank, organised by Te Kura i Awarua (Rangahau Māori Centre) and EIT Research and Innovation Centre, also heard from new EIT | Te Pūkenga Research Professor Boyd Swinburn and Dr David Rees, a founding partner of leading Australasian analytics, consulting and evaluation group, Synergia.

The Think Tank, called Food Security to Food Sovereignty, focused on why the fruit bowl of the country has masses of hungry kids and how to resolve these issues.

It centred around Nourishing Hawke’s Bay: He wairua tō te kai (NHB), a community research project led by David and Boyd. The project brings the added value of mātauranga Māori and systems science to intervention for children’s hauora (wellbeing).

“We want to continue our work on looking at the impact on children’s health through the Ministry of Education’s school lunch programme; Ka Ora, Ka Ako [KOKA],” David says.

“But we want to extend that work and move outside the schools and start to look at whānau, at rohe, communities, and the whole region, and map it in a way that we could begin to understand what was going on in the food system in Hawke’s Bay and how to press different buttons for change that might impact KOKA.”

David believes that in the Māori community, people want to get away from food security - which is about being supplied with food - to food sovereignty, which is about being in control of what happens.

The latter can be defined as a food system in which the people who produce, distribute and consume food also control the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution. There is an emphasis on local food economies, sustainable food availability and culturally centred food practices, he says.

Professor Boyd Swinburn, a nutrition and global health expert who has recently become part of the EIT | Te Pūkenga research team, said Hawke’s Bay is a region with amazing local food production systems, yet very poor nutritional health, especially for tamariki. He said that Covid-19 lockdowns exposed the existing food system’s lack of resilience and that “during lockdown, all the food services stopped, all the food piled up, and the money stopped for a lot of people who were just above the breadline and then dropped below the breadline.”

The result was a disconnect between a pile-up of food in one area and a lack of food in another, which the food system was not able to respond to.

“What was needed to respond to it were a bunch of volunteers, like Nourished for Nil, pulling food from one area to the other. So, it was a patch-up job, on an existing food system that did not respond intrinsically to the challenge of Covid-19.”

While there are many excellent initiatives, organisations, businesses, research projects and people committed to building better food systems, Swinburn said the question that remains is whether these high-level concepts can be applied to a regional level.