A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Going Hungry In A Land Of Plenty - food Insecurity in Aotearoa New Zealand (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

There is a number sitting in a new report that deserves to stop you in 
your tracks. One in three New Zealand households struggled to access 
affordable, nutritious food in the past year. Not one in a hundred. Not 
a marginal statistical blip that policy wonks can argue over in 
committee rooms. One in three. In a country that exports enough food to 
feed tens of millions of people beyond its own borders, roughly a third 
of households here could not reliably put adequate meals on the table. 
If that does not clarify something fundamental about the society we live 
in, it is hard to know what would.
The Hunger Monitor, described as the country's first comprehensive tally 
of food insecurity, surveyed three thousand people late last year and 
was commissioned by the New Zealand Food Network. The numbers it 
produced surprised even the people working on the frontlines of food 
poverty. Gavin Findlay, chief executive of the Food Network, described 
it as confronting. Ian Foster, who has run the South Auckland Christian 
Foodbank for eighteen years and distributed forty thousand food parcels 
last year alone, said he was taken aback to learn how wide the problem 
had spread. These are people who deal with hunger every single day. And 
they were surprised. That tells you something about the scale of what we 
are actually dealing with.
Nearly one in five households (eighteen percent) had experienced what 
the report calls severe food insecurity. Two thirds of households that 
struggled to afford food had experienced it for the first time last 
year. And among those going hungry for the first time, many were 
reluctant to seek help, held back by shame and embarrassment. They had 
not expected to find themselves in this position. They had played by the 
rules, done everything they were supposed to do, and still found 
themselves unable to feed their families.
That shame is not accidental. It is a feature, not a bug. The ideology 
of individual responsibility, the idea that poverty is fundamentally a 
personal failure rather than a structural condition, serves capital 
extremely well. When people blame themselves for their hunger, they do 
not organise. They do not agitate. They queue quietly at the foodbank, 
grateful for the charity of strangers, and internalise the lesson that 
the system has dispensed to them - that their suffering is their own fault.
The Hunger Monitor blows a hole through this fiction, even if it does 
not quite name it as such. Nearly half of low-income households faced 
food insecurity, yes but so did just under a third of full-time workers. 
Read that again. People who are employed. People who are going to work 
every day, fulfilling their end of a bargain that was never fair to 
begin with, and still coming home to empty cupboards. The report even 
found that twelve percent of households earning over $156,000 a year had 
experienced some form of food insecurity when burdened by debt. The 
hunger problem in New Zealand is not a story about laziness or poor 
choices. It is a story about a system that extracts labour and wealth 
from working people while delivering less and less in return.
Tracey Phillips, chief executive of the Henderson Budget Service, put it 
plainly. In the five years she has been working with families in 
financial hardship, the population seeking help has shifted. It used to 
be primarily people out of work going through a rough patch. Now it is 
working whanau. Families with children who, after paying rent, power, 
and fuel to get to work, have under a hundred dollars left at the end of 
the week. A hundred dollars. For food, for clothing, for anything 
unexpected, for the small dignities of ordinary life. The arithmetic of 
survival under contemporary capitalism has become this brutal, and still 
the dominant political conversation treats it as a problem of individual 
budgeting rather than one of structural exploitation.
Phillips names the core contradiction clearly - the cost of living has 
driven food prices up, but wages and benefits have not kept pace. There 
is a disconnect, she says, between money coming in and what is needed to 
put food on the table. This is not a mystery. It is capitalism 
functioning exactly as it is designed to. Wages are a cost to be 
minimised. Profit is a value to be maximised. The distance between the 
two is where shareholders get rich and workers go hungry. Every 
supermarket duopoly price rise, every landlord rent increase, every 
energy company quarterly profit report represents a transfer of 
resources away from working people and towards capital. The hungry 
households in this report are not the victims of a system gone wrong. 
They are the product of a system working exactly as intended.
From his warehouse in Manukau, Ian Foster described a transformation 
that has accelerated dramatically in recent years. During the Covid 
pandemic, the South Auckland Christian Foodbank was distributing a 
hundred parcels a day, and staff were staggered by the demand. They are 
now averaging a hundred and seventy-seven a day. The pandemic-era spike 
turned out not to be a spike at all. It was a new floor. And the floor 
keeps rising.
Foster identifies something important in how he talks about the people 
coming through the doors. Budgeters, he says, have done everything they 
can. The people seeking food parcels are not people who have failed to 
manage their money. They are people who have managed their money 
meticulously, found that there still is not enough, and are now at the 
door of a charity as a last resort. "Until we turn that around," he 
says, "we've got a major problem." The politeness of that framing is 
understandable for someone in his position, dependent on goodwill and 
donations. But the blunter version is this - until we fundamentally 
restructure who owns what and who gets what, we will keep having this 
problem. And it will keep getting worse.
Brook Turner from Vision West has seen a fifty percent jump in 
households seeking food help since this time last year. Fifty percent, 
in a single year. He articulates something that cuts to the heart of the 
matter, he does not understand why food is not seen as a legitimate 
need. He is right to be bewildered, though the explanation is not 
difficult to find. Food is not treated as a right under capitalism 
because treating it as a right would mean guaranteeing it regardless of 
a person's capacity to pay, which would mean decommodifying it, which 
would mean undermining the logic of the market itself. Food is a 
commodity. Hunger is leverage. If you are hungry enough, you will take 
whatever wage is offered. You will accept whatever conditions your 
employer imposes. You will be grateful. The food bank exists not to 
challenge this logic but to maintain it, to keep the hungry functional 
enough to return to work on Monday morning without the desperation 
becoming so acute that it tips into open revolt.
None of this is to disparage the people running food banks. They are 
doing necessary work under impossible conditions, driven by genuine care 
for their communities. But it is worth naming clearly what they are 
doing and what they are not doing. They are providing emergency relief 
within a system that generates the emergency. They cannot, by their 
nature, address the causes of hunger. And increasingly, they know this. 
Turner says food banks are needed for people who fall through the 
system, and he hopes the government can hear that. This is the language 
of appeal to power, which is the only language available to charities 
dependent on state funding. But the subtext is evident, the system has 
holes in it large enough for a third of the population to fall through.
The food charities asking the government to extend their funding beyond 
June this year face a grim irony. They are organisations created to 
manage the fallout of policy decisions, wage suppression, benefit 
inadequacy, housing costs left to the market, now dependent on the 
political goodwill of the same class of people whose decisions created 
the crisis in the first place. If the government does not extend 
funding, Vision West and others face reducing services or closing 
entirely, precisely at the moment when demand has never been higher. 
This is the bind that charity always finds itself in under capitalism - 
it fills gaps that should not exist while remaining structurally unable 
to close them.
What would it actually mean to solve the problem of food insecurity in 
Aotearoa? It would mean wages that genuinely reflect the cost of living, 
set not by what the market will bear but by what people actually need to 
live well. It would mean benefits sufficient to eat on, housed in an 
adequate and affordable home, without choosing between rent and food. It 
would mean a housing system that serves people rather than investors, 
because housing costs are eating the money that families need for food. 
It would mean confronting the supermarket duopoly that has consistently 
prioritised shareholder returns while squeezing suppliers and charging 
working people ever more for basic groceries. It would mean, ultimately, 
an economy organised around meeting human needs rather than accumulating 
private wealth.
The Hunger Monitor is described as a benchmark, a baseline against which 
future years can be measured. There is something quietly devastating 
about that framing. We are now at the stage of formally documenting and 
tracking mass hunger in one of the wealthiest countries on earth, and 
treating this documentation as progress. In a way, it is progress of a 
kind. You cannot solve a problem you refuse to see. But measurement is 
not a solution. A spreadsheet tracking the depth of the crisis each year 
is not a substitute for dismantling the conditions that created it.
One in three households. In a country that grows and exports food in 
extraordinary abundance. The land is not the problem. The farmers are 
not the problem. The workers who pack and transport and stock and sell 
food are not the problem. The problem is who owns the land, who controls 
the supply chains, who sets the wages, who collects the rents, who 
pockets the difference between what things cost to produce and what they 
are sold for. The problem has a name, and the Hunger Monitor, for all 
its value, is not permitted to say it.
We can say it. The problem is capitalism. The solution begins with 
understanding that food, like shelter, like healthcare, like all the 
things human beings need to survive and flourish, belongs to everyone. 
Not as a charity. Not as a conditional gift from the state. Not as a 
commodity dispensed to those with the means to pay. As a right, 
inseparable from the fact of being human, and guaranteed by a society 
that has organised itself around meeting the needs of all its members 
rather than the profits of a few.
Until then, the warehouses in Manukau will keep running. The numbers 
will keep climbing. And a country with enough food for everyone will 
keep watching a third of its people go without.

https://awsm.nz/going-hungry-in-a-land-of-plenty-food-insecurity-in-aotearoa-new-zealand/
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