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New Zealand's food system is in "disarray", with major cross-sector challenges to resilience, a leading scientist says.
There was a growing need for a national food strategy to improve the country's food resilience, Te Whare Wānaka o Aoraki Lincoln University Professor Alan Renwick said.
Food systems needed to withstand shocks from international conflicts or disasters, as well as deal with accessibility and health concerns, he said.
One example cited by Renwick was of price shocks during the Covid-19 pandemics.
He said food price inflation during that time was more severe and persisted longer in New Zealand than elsewhere.
That was partly to do with a food system that was very reliant on imports and a concentrated agriculture system, he said.
"The idea to me about food system resilience, is we're able to maintain good access to food for our people, at a reasonable price, even when these shocks come along."
He said the rise in food inflation in New Zealand since 2021 had resulted in further challenges for families.
"We need to understand how our food system and supply chains differ from other countries. Is it that supermarkets have too little competition? Is it a consequence of our export-focused primary production that is detrimental to our food supply?"
A national strategy would combine work across agriculture, environment, and health to improve food resilience, in preparation for times of scarcity but also for the everyday.
"What I'm thinking about with a national food strategy is we're taking things into account when we're making decisions about food.
"So it's not just compartmentalised in one area, but we're looking right across the food system when we make decisions."
New Zealand's food production may need to diversify to be more resilient - but that was challenging when farmers made their decisions based on income, and incentives were needed, Renwick said.
"We tended to have this focus on efficiency, which is very specialised production in terms of monocultures to some extent, and a focus very much on regions. So if we can begin to diversify our production across New Zealand we could be more resilient to these changes."
Before forming a strategy, it was important that the issues facing the sector were fully understood, Renwick said.
"We have major challenges with waste - up to one-third of the food we're producing is not being consumed. This, coupled with a food system incurring high input costs, means we are using costly resources to produce food that is thrown away."
New Zealand's productivity growth rates had declined since 2000 and the primary sector was also struggling with profitability, he said.
Meanwhile, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation had estimated that for every New Zealand dollar of output in the food system, there were 83 cents of hidden environmental costs, including greenhouse gas and nitrogen emissions, water quality and scarcity. That figure did not take biodiversity loss into account.
The government needed to take the lead on a national food strategy in order to pull all the sectors together, Renwick said.