Katharine Cresswell Riol explains why food charity shouldn't be considered part of a high-income country’s food security response
As the temperature plummets into the thick of winter, the number of New Zealanders needing food bank assistance will inevitably increase due to household funds being funnelled into trying to keep warm rather than adequately fed.
But food charity cannot be regarded as the long-term solution to food insecurity: it places the onus on the disadvantaged individual, depriving them of their rights, when it is the government that must be held to account for not ensuring that everyone has fair and dignified access to food.
Although it is anticipated this month’s benefit payment increases will assist those living in severe poverty, for most, incomes remain unliveable. This means at least a million Kiwis will inevitably require food parcels over the coming months, with certain groups disproportionately affected.
With the onset of 2020 Covid-19 lockdown conditions, it was estimated that the number of food insecure people in the country doubled to 20 percent.
In response to the pandemic-induced rise in indigence, the Ministry of Social Development announced it would invest $32 million over the next few years into organisations distributing food relief as part of its Food Secure Communities initiative.
Food charity is important for emergencies, and the pandemic was just that. However, food banks have been used as the dominant response to hunger for the last three decades in Aotearoa, and food charity should not - and cannot - be considered part of a high-income country’s food security response.
Food banks are clearly not part of the social welfare system, yet they have increasingly morphed from being a last resort to the next step in the social welfare process.
The realisation that food banks are indicative of policy inadequacy in addressing hunger, as well as of successive governments’ lack of political will to put social policies in place that ensure all its citizens have a minimum, let alone adequate, standard of living is not new. Such sentiments have been voiced since food banks rapidly expanded in response to neoliberal policies introduced in the 1980s and 90s.
However, the protests and protestations that prevailed didn’t prevent this form of food charity from becoming a normal part of society, as is apparent today.
The entrenchment of food banks is not merely fortuitousness: it has been buoyed by those who have benefitted from it.
WINZ has been referring people to food banks since the 90s, enabling the government to shirk its obligations.
Food banks are clearly not part of the social welfare system, yet they have increasingly morphed from being a last resort to the next step in the social welfare process.
Businesses, particularly supermarkets, have made money through additional consumer purchases in the form of donations, and by donating their “waste” food, i.e. food surplus to economic requirements, thereby sidestepping the costs of dumping it, along with having to deal with the fact it exists in the first place.
Food rescue organisations have therefore been a godsend to supermarkets, enabling them to get rid of much larger amounts of “waste” food in one go, and portraying them as climate change heroes in the process.
The subsequent connection of food charity to other social justice issues – waste reduction and climate change mitigation – has enabled the normalisation of food banks to become less insidious, justifying their existence and obscuring the primary reason they exist in the first place: structurally-induced hunger. Nowadays, the food bank no longer symbolises injustices, but provides a way in which to address injustices.
Instead of using the pandemic as an excuse to embed food banks further into the fabric of society, it should be used as a window of opportunity for making structural improvements to reduce inequality and food poverty.
Although food banks may have become more socially acceptable, those who rely on them remain outside the limits of such social acceptability as having to depend on food parcels is devoid of dignity and mana.
This is compounded by the societal blame and shame that continues to be placed on food bank dependency. And it’s true: people should not have to be dependent on charity.
But this outrage should not be directed at the victims, it should be directed at the perpetrators who have made them dependent. Philanthropy has thereby obscured not only what the problem is, but who is accountable.
The fact that food is a human right – and a human right that has been ratified on the international stage by successive Aotearoa governments – means that people’s reliance on food parcels is not simply a moral question, but a legal one.
Under this human right, the state has obligations to ensure an enabling environment within which people can access food in a socially acceptable manner, which, in a capitalist country, equates to being able to purchase it. Moving from needs to rights, and from charity to obligations, brings into focus who’s actually accountable.
Instead of using the pandemic as an excuse to embed food banks further into the fabric of society, it should be used as a window of opportunity for making structural improvements to reduce inequality and food poverty. It is high time the state accepted responsibility and embedded the human right to adequate food in its domestic legislation.
This would allow for the creation of a food system that is fair and dignified, i.e. one in which everyone has guaranteed access to food that is nutritious and culturally appropriate, and in which food is acknowledged as a human right not merely a commodity, and hunger as an issue of justice, not charity.
