Green's Menu for Change launches food revolution

Green Party Co-Leader Jeanette Fitzsimons today launched a Menu for Change - a basket of goodies designed to ensure New Zealanders have access to affordable, healthy food, in her speech to the Party’s Annual Conference today.

“Food affordability is becoming more and more of an issue as the effects of the current economic downturn begin to bite. The Green Party has taken a holistic approach to the problem and have today provided a basket of measures that will help New Zealanders get healthy food on the family’s table,” Ms Fitzsimons says.

“Included among the measures is a Commerce Commission led Food Price Inquiry, similar to that being held in Australia, to investigate food prices and the growing gap between what the farmer receives and what the consumer pays.

“It will consider whether tougher competition law is needed to manage our supermarket duopoly, which sells 94 percent of our groceries and has the power to squeeze both the farmer and the consumer. It may be that we need a farmer to consumer code of conduct for supermarkets.

“In addition, a food security strategy and investigation into the vulnerability of our basic staples to overseas events will help New Zealanders regain control of their food supply.

“The basket contains a number of measures designed to help people grow their own food, including gardens and fruit trees in schools as well as supporting local farmers and growers. It includes a challenge to Fonterra to cap the cost of milk for New Zealanders and decouple it from the overseas influences that are pushing the prices up.

“Food affordability is also about how the rest of the family budget is eaten up by cost increases. Our incomes policy will ensure that no-one has to go hungry. A universal child benefit will ensure all children can afford healthy food and healthy houses. Benefits will be indexed to a basket of food, energy and housing costs and as well as the average wage and the minimum wage will be increased to reflect the real cost of living and eating healthily. More social housing and security of tenancy for those renting privately will give people certainty that they will be able to plant a garden and stay long enough to harvest the fruits of their labour.

“With the items on our Menu for Change, New Zealanders can look forward to a future where healthy food is available to every family.” 

www.greens.org.nz  

Annual Meeting Speech - 2008

Some things are BIGGER than politics

Some things are bigger than politics.

What right does a politician, of all people, have to say that?

Surely politics is what we do; surely we want to reinstate politics as the place where the big issues are argued and everyone gets a say? Surely we want to defend the political process against the encroachment of vested interests and big money?

Of course we do. We want to do politics differently. But that’s not where politics is seen to be now. Politics is despised by many because what they see on their small screens is name calling and point scoring, playing to the gallery, trivial issues blown out of all proportion, big issues ignored and denigrated, and an assumption that everything said on the other side of the house must be stupid and wrong.

Politicians want to play politics with everything. If you moan a bit about the price of cheese, the next thing you know you've got politicians promising to cut cheese taxes, or remove bureaucratic red tape from the business of cheese making, or prevent foreign cheese from coming in corrupting our kiwi cheeses. You'll have parties promising common sense cheese policies, forward looking cheese policies, even referenda on cheeses. No one though will take one step back and look at the cows. Or the economic system and assumptions they are part of.

But more on that later.

For the vast majority of us, our most important political act is not submitting to a select committee on the Emissions Trading Scheme. It's not cruising the Press Gallery looking to harangue Guyon Espiner or Duncan Garner. It's not even a three yearly spot of voting.

Our most important political act is simply trying to live well and fairly. As Nandor laid out yesterday, living well and fairly is no longer an easy task when no one knows the rules any more. Within a generation the rules have changed beyond anything we had prepared for.

We said when we launched the slogan 'some things are bigger than politics' that it showed we were determined to seek the higher ground. It signalled our belief that we could and should put ourselves above petty political posturing.

We wanted you to know that we could see the big things in your lives and in our future, and they are priorities for us in the Greens too. They aren’t things we work on for political kudos. They are things that need to be done.

We can’t afford to lose time and momentum scoring shots in Parliament while the planet spins on. Our urgency forces us to focus on the same bigger purpose that you sense is missing too often from Parliament.

We launched the slogan as a challenge. We wanted your attention. We said something that you would not expect politicians to say. We told a truth that no-one wants to hear.

People are asking “where are the Greens?” because many people are starting to grasp the enormity of the problem we face.

NASA's chief climatologist James Hanson recently stated:

"If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted ….. CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

That’s science speak for saying things are a whole lot worse that we thought.

The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, who is here in NZ this week, put it more succinctly:

“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

If the next two to three years are crucial, wouldn’t you feel safer if there were more Greens in Parliament to force stronger action?

The truth is that our planet, our economy, our people, our families are hurtling into a horrific, entirely unintended accident. We can see the slick ahead. Our politicians are doing two things. They are flinching and looking the other way because the truth is too awful to contemplate. And they are putting their foot on the accelerator, hoping faster and more furious will get us across the other side.

There is no other side. We cannot climb off the planet, dust ourselves off and walk away.

What we need is no less than a rapid transformation of the New Zealand economy and way of living to a low carbon, sustainable way of life. That can still be a life of joy and abundance, but not a life of waste.

It means every business adopting world’s best practice in energy efficiency and cleaner production. It means innovative and new technology. It means homes that are warm without much heating, appliances that use much less energy. It means fast, comfortable public transport and safe cycling; cars that are twice as fuel efficient on average as they are now.

It means limiting the growth of dairying until it can control its methane and nitrous oxide emissions and stop its pollution of our waterways. It means nitrification inhibitors, less intensive stocking, biogas from farm wastes, high sugar low methane grasses, a phase out of coal mining and burning, new renewable energy, and it means all those things NOW. Not 2050, not 2030, not even 2013 – NOW.

What is the government offering? A carbon trading system.

Well, that’s not our first preference, but it is important to have a price on carbon and we’ve been calling for that for some time. If our economy is based on buying and selling, and takes no interest in what is bought or sold, then at least a carbon price will make people take notice of their emissions. But the real question is whether this flurry of excitement among those who want to speculate in the carbon price, or set up trading platforms to clip the ticket when others buy and sell, will lead to any real reduction in carbon emissions.

According to the government’s own figures, not very much. They say emissions, apart from forestry, will reduce by less than 2% during the first Kyoto period. That’s far less than the reductions we have made with the simple changes in codes and standards in the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy I’ve led for the last two years.

The next question is whether the cost of it all will be shared fairly.

There is no escaping the truth that addressing climate change does not come free. We have sat for weeks in select committee listening to special pleading from firms saying “we support emissions trading, as long as it doesn’t cost us money”. Well, I’m sorry, but the whole point is to cost money for carrying on with business as usual and enable people to save money if they change.

But this scheme does not share the effort fairly.

Households and small business will pay 90% of the cost even though they produce only 30% of the emissions.

That’s mainly because half of our emissions, those from agriculture and waste, don’t enter the scheme until 2013, the year after Pachauri says it is too late.

During the first 5 year Kyoto period ordinary workers in South Auckland will be subsidising dairy farmers who last year increased their gross incomes by an average of a quarter of a million dollars each.

So much for the reality. What about the politics?

Labour has been spooked by the Greenhouse Policy coalition and Rio Tinto, who happen to own a smelter at a place appropriately named Bluff. Delays have been announced for transport and the phase out of subsidies. National has gone into competition with Labour to see who could delay the scheme the longest, and said they will not vote for it in this term of Parliament so they can water it down next term. Now, Labour is scrabbling about, looking for a majority in the House. There is more than one way it can get that majority, but it can’t do it without the Greens.

So this week we gave Labour our requirements for a better scheme. There’s not time to list them all here, and they all matter, but here are some highlights:

We must have some movement on agriculture.
We cannot leave transport to do nothing till 2011.That’s where our biggest oportunities are, and a phase in starting next year would be much easier than a sudden price jump in 2011.
We cannot allow foresters to clear regenerating native forest and get credits for planting pines. There has to be a biodiversity standard.
We need to close the giant loopholes in the renewable electricity section that would allow any thermal power station to be built anywhere.
We cannot leave all the key decisions to regulations next year – Parliament should be sovereign.
We must take the windfall profits that our state owned power companies will make under the Emissions Trading Scheme and use this money to help households and small business become more efficient so their bills are lower even though prices are higher.
If politicians are too scared by the upcoming crash to tell us about anything other than traditional politics, to tell us what they have always told us, what are the things they are ignoring? What are the things that are bigger than politics?

Instinctively we all know.

I recently talked to a young mother with two young children. She does a duty once a week at her local playcentre, reads stories to her kids before they go to bed and struggles, like all mothers before her, to get them to wear woolly jerseys their grandmothers had knitted for them when it is cold.

She told me about the things in her life that are bigger than politics.

And the stories were simple – she just wants a good life for her children – for them to be able to sit in among cabbage trees and pohutukawas when they are adults like she does now. To be able to swim in the rivers as we used to.

Along the way she and her children will need a warm house. They need a friendly local school and a hospital down the road with doctors that are there for her when that horrid 'my child is feverish and I don't know what is wrong' feeling grips her stomach at 3am one morning.

In other words, she wants someone to stand up and guarantee that they will do all in their might to guarantee a healthy planet and a healthy community like she grew up with. She wants someone to pick up James Hanson's challenge to preserve a planet similar to the one we have now.

She wants to be able to put safe, healthy, affordable food on her table for her children.

That all seems like a simple goal but it's not. In a world where a box of breakfast cereal takes seven times more energy to produce and transport to the table than it puts into a child’s tummy a young mother like her knows she cannot take food for granted. She walks into a shop and she's confronted with nutrition labels, additives, colours, preservatives, pesticides, stabilisers and sterilisers.

But the thing that she knows is the thing that everybody knows, but no one wants to say.

We are at the limit now. Our food chain is the largest tumour in an economic system that calls for growth at all costs, even the cost of life.

There are an estimated 845 million hungry people in the world. 25,000 people die everyday from starvation.

The Government's own New Zealand Food New Zealand Children survey a few years ago found that 1 in 5 families with children could not always afford to eat properly. Only 2 out of 5 children ate enough fruit. That was before we lost control of food prices.

Down the road from here, in Manukau, the Salvation Army reported a twenty percent increase in food parcels that it gave out this April compared to last. The Army's manager Ross Richards said the demand for food parcels was now as high as it was after the National Government raised state house rents to market levels in the 1990s.

Internationally the price of wheat has gone up by 130% over the last year. In Asia the price of rice has doubled this year. From Haiti to Cameroon to Bangladesh, people have been taking to the streets in anger at being unable to afford the food they need. Food stocks have plummeted. The United Nations is pleading for more food aid and a radical reform of global farming practices. And yet, despite all that we do not actually have a food shortage.

Last year the world's farmers produced a record 2.3 billion tons of grain in 2007, up 4% on the previous year. In the last fifty years the world’s cereal production has significantly outpaced our population growth.

There is enough food produced in the world to feed the population. The problem is that it doesn’t get to those who need it. Less than half of the world’s grain production is directly eaten by people.

It takes 2.6 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of chicken and 13 kg of grai to produce 1 kg of beef. This is why our grass fed lamb and beef are the most sustainable meat options here, and possibly in the world.

The challenge food faces is that we have hit peak oil and climate change simultaneously.

On one hand our crops struggle from droughts, storms and poorly conceived attempts to turn food into bio-fuel and animal feed.

On the other hand we have used all the cheap oil there is to burn and remaining reserves will only cost more and more to extract. In a global economy built and powered on oil we face an economic meltdown, a recession with no end. And the biggest victim of peak oil is going to be the way we currently grow food, with high inputs of fertiliser made from fossil fuel and high inputs of liquid fuel to run farm machinery and transport food long distances.

We have successfully grown despite the odds into every corner of the earth. We have grown into bigger houses, bigger lifestyles and bigger aeroplane seats.

We have eaten everything that stayed still long enough to be caught, then started growing things and eating them too. And then we supercharged those farms pumping them full of oil and growing bigger taller fatter, demanding the foods all looked uniformly regimental so they could be shipped around the country and the world to distribution centres before we ship them back out again to our local supermarkets.

In New Zealand we produce a lot of food for a global market, but it is also being increasingly standardised and removed from our view. Industrial dairy, caged hens and fertilizer are fed into a supermarket duopoly that separates us, as eaters, from the source of our own food. 96 percent of our groceries are bought distributed and sold by just two companies.

We aren’t always entitled to know where our food comes from, how it got to us and what happened to it along the way. Our election campaign is about restoring the right to know and right to choose.

We have allowed food to be transformed from something that we eat to something that we trade; an international commodity on a speculative market. Increasingly a few large companies own our food chain and dictate not just what we eat and how much it costs, but how much we eat and when.

In the 1950's the world invented the ‘Green Revolution’ one of the misnamed tragedies of our time. It tried to replace sunlight, time and soil with fertilisers and chemicals. It seemed so successful that from the 1970s the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the WTO stepped in to liberalise trade and impose our new model of farming on the rest of the world's farmers. Now 80 percent of the world's hungry are small scale farmers.

Agricultural policy somehow was no longer about feeding people – it was suddenly about exporting to the world. Suddenly it made more sense to irrigate dry soils and cover them with increasing numbers of cows. Somehow it started to make sense when those cows did not have enough to eat to feed them wheat, rather than growing winter feed crops of turnips or kale on the farm. Or to import Malaysian oil cakes for cows to eat from palm plantation where tropical rainforests and orangutans used to grow.

The UN World Food Programme estimates that recent price rises mean that an additional 100 million people can no longer afford to eat adequately.

Meanwhile over half of the world’s wheat is in the hands of investment bankers and traders on the world’s biggest commodity markets.[9] The amount of money now speculated in commodities futures – markets where investors do not buy or sell a physical commodity, like rice or wheat, but merely bet on price movements – has ballooned from US$5 billion in 2000 to US$175 billion to 2007.[10]

So we are launching a food revolution.

The task we face requires no less than the effort we muster in wartime. We will not win, we can not win, we do not deserve to win unless we build a coalition of the willing.

Today that is what I am doing. I'm recruiting a democratic coalition of the willing for our revolution. Our revolution is not a violent one with guns and tanks. Nor is it a falsely stereotypical one of hippies and activists. Our coalition will not come from the Ureweras. Although all those people are welcome. It is an army of young mothers and older grandmothers – and yes, men are allowed too - who will demand the right to know what is in the food they feed their children. It is an army of families declaring food democracy by lobbying for their school to grow and serve fresh local foods. It is a willing coalition of farmers that are going to remove the oil and carbon emissions from our food chain. It is a coalition of chefs who will stock their restaurants, cafes and tearooms with food from local farmers. It is grandparents, uncles and aunties handing down to new generations home made scone recipes. It is people, citizens, demanding food policy is no longer primarily about trading, but about eating well. Together we will regain and rebuild our independence and interdependence

Like all good revolutionaries our coalition has written a manifesto.

It reads:

We the people shall have control over our food. We will sustain ourselves.

Our food supply will be independent from world price shocks and shortages

We will grow the delicious healthy food our people need to thrive

Seasonal fruit and vegetables will be affordable and easily available, even in our cities.

Additives without nutritional value will remain in labs rather than our food chain.

Our kids will know where food comes from and understand about growing things

Communities will be able to trace food back to local farmers, local shop keepers and local manufacturers.

Farming and food production will provide stable, healthy employment and help to rebuild our rural communities.

Our effective, sustainable farming practices and the quality of our orgaic produce will be renowned at home and overseas.

The way we grow our food will contribute to our beautiful environment, landscapes and waterways, as well as our health.

Sometimes people hear this vision then look at our present government and despair. Then they look at National and despair becomes despondency. But there is hope.

Last election voters scared of Don Brash mistakenly felt they had to choose between voting with their heart for the Greens or voting with their head to keep out Brash. The result was those voters very nearly did get Brash, and had to settle in the end for Winston Peters and Peter Dunne sitting at a cabinet table ruling on the well-being of our environment.

This election don’t make the same mistake again. Don't just vote with your head. Don't even just vote with your heart. Vote with your stomach too. This year the Green Party will campaign for a food revolution.

We will launch a Commerce Commission led Food Price Inquiry similar to that being held in Australia that will investigate food prices and the growing gap between what the farmer receives and what the consumer pays. It will consider whether tougher competition law is needed to manage our supermarket duopoly which has the power to squeeze both the farmer and the consumer. It may be we need a farmer to consumer code of conduct for supermarkets.
We will develop a food security strategy and investigate the vulnerability of our basic staples to overseas events. We need a plan to regain control of our food supply for a healthy nation in an oil constrained world - that might mean creating incentives to a diversity of local producers to shorten the food chain and produce locally, to make sure that we're not totally victim to global price shocks.
We will look at how to support industries that are struggling such as our garlic, pork and wheat industries.
We will introduce mandatory country of origin labelling that allows consumers to know where food comes from.
We will ensure that no biofuel sold in NZ is made from food or competes with food production – in fact we already have, in our negotiations with the Government on the Biofuel Bill currently before select committee.
We will extend government procurement guidelines for healthy local food purchasing by schools, prisons, hospitals that will support local producers to continue to grow affordable fresh healthy food.
We will extend the fruit in schools and breakfast in schools programme to all schools including programmes to plant fruit and vegetables in primary schools - kids will learn integrated gardening and cooking skills at school, and eat the results of their efforts.
We will create a more resilient nation by encouraging New Zealanders to grow some of their own food with gardening websites and other support. We will provide funding, logistical and promotional support for gardeners and community gardens, and for farmers’ markets in more communities, to help promote urban self reliance.
We will promote heritage seed banks, that protect our genetic diversity, building on our successful budget bid this year, so we don’t lose those old varieties
We will take a number of fish species, including eels and kahawai out of the QMS to be returned to cultural and recreational fishing only, so that our fish stocks can recover from unsustainable fishing and allow local communities the ability to catch fish for their table again.
We will stand up for the long term solutions of sustainable and ethical food production: organic, GM-free, biodiverse, low-chemical input/ IPM and with respect for animal welfare and community values.
 

Food affordability is also about how the rest of the family budget is eaten up by cost increases. Our incomes policy will ensure that no-one has to go hungry.

We will introduce a universal child benefit that ensures all children can afford healthy food and healthy houses.
We will raise core benefits and index levels to a basket of food, energy and housing costs as well as to wages
We will build more social housing and provide security of tenancy for those renting privately - it's hard to grow your own food when you're moving around all the time as rents go up, and it's also hard to afford good food as the price goes up when you're spending such a lot of your income on rent.
We will ensure widespread affordable public transport that reduces the need for ever more expensive petrol and allows more money to be spent on food.
And while we are looking after ourselves, we will not forget the billion or so people who are much worse affected by the world food crisis than us: those who already go to bed hungry most of the time, and who will be pushed into starvation by the current high prices.

We will expand New Zealand's overseas aid contribution to the internationally agreed 0.7% of GDP by 2015 and focus especially on helping establish sustainable, local food production
We will question New Zealand’s free trade liberalisation dogma and promote fair trade.
There is one example of food price rises that is particularly puzzling. Kiwis are wondering why we are paying 60% more for a litre of milk than we were a year ago.

First, it is seen by many as a staple highly nutritious food, a good source of protein for children especially, and a key part of the Kiwi diet for generations. It is not a luxury.

Secondly, if there is one thing we can produce efficiently here, it is milk. In fact, we produce so much that we can use only 4% of it here and the rest is exported. It's true that costs of farm production and factory processing keep rising with the price of oil and other inputs, but not by 60% in one year.

The payout to farmers has risen spectacularly, but again, not by 60%. The fact is that a major driver of milk and cheese prices here is our link into the global markets. Families on low wages here have to compete with the wealthiest commodity traders and speculators of much larger countries to afford a product grown just along the road.

Today I want to issue a challenge to Fonterra. Show us you are a good kiwi company. Give something back to the country that has provided you with a great climate, cheap energy and hard working farmers that have allowed you to become so successful. Sell your products in NZ at a price that our people can afford. You make so much on your exports, you can afford to make less profit on the 4% you sell here. We are all New Zealanders, in this together. The PR benefits to you would be enormous, the cost very little. You would earn the respect of us all.

So we launch our food revolution with a plea for generosity and fairness – both within NZ and in our relationships with less fortunate countries.

Vandana Shiva describes food democracy this way:

“The right to safe, good, and adequate food is a universal human right and the basis of food democracy. No society can call itself free if it operates in violation of food democracy.”

Let us value quality food again, remembering the smell of freshly baked bread, digging potatoes on a frosty morning, finding wild berries on a walk and planning a pie for the night. It is about us all, as people, living well together knowing the choices we made not only averted the crash in time, but left us with the warm taste of community, of cooperation and celebration in our mouths.

A no reira

tena koutou, tena koutou, tena tatau katoa


Menu for change: background information 

Food affordability is a key issue for New Zealanders struggling to cope with rising food prices and the Green Party is proud to unveil a new policy package to help all Kiwis access healthy, locally produced food.

The Green Party recognises that food affordability is linked to people’s incomes, their transport options, housing situation, and their communities and schools.

Milk and other dairy prices have soared over the past year, making basic healthy foods that we produce here unaffordable for many New Zealanders. The price we pay for milk is linked to the international price. Fonterra controls 96 percent of New Zealand’s dairy production, and exports 96 percent of that offshore.

Food affordability and supermarkets are inextricably linked, so the Green Party would regain control of our food chain by:

Calling a Commerce Commission Food Price Inquiry, similar to Australia, to consider whether farmers and consumers are treated fairly
Providing support for small local independent food retailers and farmers markets
Providing stronger competition laws
Develop a ‘farmer to consumer’ code of conduct for supermarkets
Develop a long term food security strategy for New Zealand
 

The relationship between Food affordability and incomes is critical as buying healthy food becomes increasingly difficult for many people because of inadequate incomes. This affects both beneficiaries and those in low-wage employment.

The Green Party will help by:

Setting the minimum wage at 66 percent of the average wage. This would increase the current minimum wage of $12 an hour to $15 an hour
Setting main welfare benefit amounts at a level sufficient for all basic needs of individuals and families
Protecting welfare benefit levels by indexing rates to a basket of food, energy and housing price indices and legislating for a benefit level floor to ensure main benefits cannot fall below a fixed percentage of the average wage
Universalising the ‘In-Work Payment’ component of Working for Families into the proposed Universal Child Benefit package to support children of beneficiary and student parents
Reintroducing a discretionary Special Benefit as a safety net to meet the needs of people who are receiving full entitlements to income support but still cannot meet their essential expenses
 

Community-based solutions will help more people grow some of their own food, and have better access to affordable, healthy food grown locally by others.
 

The Green Party will:

Support initiatives such as community gardens, allotment schemes, training for people in gardening including in small spaces, and the growing of fruit trees in public spaces
Encourage programmes to bring growers and consumers closer, including community assisted agriculture, farmers’ markets, bartering schemes, the exchange and gifting of surplus produce, and consumer and grower cooperatives
Support assistance for gardening for low income people, including through Housing New Zealand and Work and Income, for example with grants for seeds and basic tools; and training and job creation programmes in gardening
 

Housing costs are a determining factor in how much people have left from their income to buy food. As food prices rise, people are often faced with choices between their standard of housing, and how much they can spend feeding their families. Housing security is also a problem as people whose accommodation situation is insecure rarely have time, space or motivation to grow their own food.

The Green Party will work to ensure everyone’s housing needs are met, by speeding up state housing supply, and better support for community sector housing programmes.

The Green Party will:

Change tenancy laws so renters have greater security of tenure
Support measures to make both home ownership and rental more affordable, including introducing a capital gains tax on all but the family home, and establishing a Universal Child Benefit which can be capitalised for part or all of a deposit on a first home
Support programmes for Housing NZ, council and other low income tenants to encourage food growing, including balcony gardens, allotment systems and the planting of fruit trees
 

Public transport should be widespread and affordable, to allow more of New Zealanders’ household budgets to be spent on other basic living expenses such as food.

Children in schools need to learn about good food, and how to grow and cook it, so they are equipped to feed themselves healthily and affordably as adults.

The Green Party will:

Develop an integrated core curriculum package for schools, teaching children how to grow food, how to cook it, what food is healthy and why they need it
Extend the fruit in schools and breakfast in schools programme to all schools
 

While New Zealanders have been struggling with increased food prices, the food crisis is felt hardest in developing countries. We rely on developing countries for many staple foods not produced in New Zealand. As a wealthy nation, we have an obligation to provide Overseas Development Aid at a level that is meaningful.

Green Party will

Increase the Overseas Development Aid budget to 0.7 percent by 2015
Contribute to the World Food Programme Emergency Food Aid fund
 

The full Green Party Food Policy will be announced later this year.