Stories & Pānui
Building a National Food Strategy for Aotearoa New Zealand
Each year, World Food Day invites us to pause and reflect on how we feed ourselves and each other. The 2025 theme, “Hand in Hand for Better Food and a Better Future,” reminds us that food systems are at their best when built on collaboration across communities, sectors, and generations.
Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, that invitation lands with resonance.
Kai Motuhake - reflecting back and moving forwards
A year on from the publication of our Kai Motuhake resource, our co-authors - Kore Hiakai Kaimahi Moko Morris, Pou Māori and Tric Malcolm, Pou Ārahi - reflect on how it has been carried into different places and spaces.
We also include perspectives from invited contributors discussing how Kai Motuhake now shapes their mahi and is being lived out in their communities.
What does decolonisation and re-indigenisation mean to you in your context or organisation?
Reflections on Te Whiringa
In early July, Kore Hiakai hosted Te Whiringa, a two-day national hui held at Zealandia – Te Māra a Tāne in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. We gathered new members to launch our Collective, alongside longtime friends, curious newcomers, our Kai Rawa trustees, and the Kore Hiakai kaimahi unit. We also acknowledge those who couldn’t be there but are a valued part of this journey.
One of our aims was to weave together a diverse tapestry of people from across the food and equity systems. In doing so, we hoped to disrupt our collective thinking and explore how joined-up solutions across sectors and perspectives might create a food secure Aotearoa.
Let connection be our antidote
Our tamariki, our older people, our communities, our schools, our whānau, our whenua, our taiao. These are the things we value. In a world that feels quite hard right now, there is an invitation to soften ourselves and gently hold all that we truly value at the fore.
This year’s Budget Day was a bit of a mixed bag. Iwi, hapū and community food providers are grateful to have some funding continue, especially as we watch so many other seemingly essential services reduced or removed. But the funding that we have been offered is small, a drop in the bucket of our response to poverty and our journey towards a food secure Aotearoa. Yet, even a small pebble can make a ripple that continues to shift a large body of water.
Tangata Moana Pay Equity Project Update
Reflecting on our roots reminds us that this kaupapa is about more than addressing hunger—it’s about transforming the systems that shape our lives. Food security is deeply tied to equity, and for Tangata Moana, that means confronting the realities of pay inequity in the very food system they help sustain.
Pasifika people experience food insecurity at higher rates than any other group in Aotearoa. At the same time, many are employed across the food system—often in low-wage roles. This project seeks to understand and disrupt that imbalance by naming the structures that create it, and imagining new ones that allow all our communities to thrive.
In recent months, our Pou Pasifika, Philippa Holmes, has been carrying this kaupapa with care—connecting with Pacific leaders, workers, and thinkers across Tāmaki Makaurau, and helping shape a grounded and collective path forward.
Why are food banks still relevant?
Today, more people are food insecure than ever previously recorded in Aotearoa. 27% of our children – that is 263,000 tamariki - live in homes where food sometimes run out. Food banks are distributing food parcels at around twice the rate they were before COVID. In our current economic climate, unemployment is yet to peak. How we respond to this persistent need for food reveals what we choose to value, as a society.