Perspective
Can we feed our team of five million first? Authors: Nick W. Smith1,2, Sarah L. Golding1, Andrew J. Fletcher1,2,3, Jeremy P. Hill1,2,3, Warren C. McNabb1,2 1 2 Riddet Institute, Massey University, Private Bag 11222, Palmerston North 4442, New Zealand. Sustainable Nutrition Initiative, Riddet Institute, Massey University, Palmerston 3 North, New Zealand. Fonterra Research and Development Centre, Private Bag 11029, Palmerston, 4442 New Zealand.
Introduction There is growing debate in the New Zealand media and at various meetings, summits and dialogues, as to whether our current local food system dynamics are optimal. The argument being made is that New Zealand produces more food than is required by our population, and yet many people do not have healthy diets, good nutrition or, go hungry. Another claim is that the prices for nutritious foods that we export (e.g. milk and meat) are unaffordable, and driven up by export demand. In a land of plenty, should New Zealanders be accessing food banks? This question raises many issues of a social, economic, educational, environmental and policy nature.
DELTA Model The Riddet Institute developed the DELTA Model to be able to answer
food system questions on a global scale. But we can also analyse the availability of nutrients to the New Zealand population (Smith et al., 2021; Sustainable Nutrition Initiative, 2021). This model analyses food production, export and imports, with consideration of non-food uses of products, waste and inedible portions. The remaining food available for consumption is converted into nutrients available for consumption, and bioavailability adjustments are made for protein and the indispensable amino acids. For this article, the quantities of available nutrients were compared to the nutrient requirements of the New Zealand population, using demographic information on the age and gender structure of the whole population and nutrient intake targets for each group, as these vary across their lifetime. This allowed us to compare nutrient availability with national requirements, extending the work of Rush and Obolonkin (2020) to individual nutrient dynamics. The results are presented in Table 1 and Figure 1 on a per capita per day basis, for ease of interpretation.
Figure 1. The data in Table 1 presented in graphical form. It is clear to see that production and export dominate dynamics for most nutrients in New Zealand October/November 2021
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