Katherine Trought

Governing food security trade-offs: international lessons for Aotearoa

Aotearoa New Zealand is a major global food producer, yet many households experience food insecurity and inequitable access to healthy food. Climate change and environmental degradation also threaten food production and supply. Responsibility for food availability, affordability, health, trade and environmental outcomes is distributed across government portfolios, but New Zealand lacks a coordinated national food strategy to manage their interconnections and trade-offs. Internationally, many countries are adopting integrated approaches to strengthen food security across agriculture, health, trade, environment and wellbeing.

This presentation examines the governance arrangements needed to provide reliable, affordable and healthy food while maintaining resilience to environmental, economic and supply disruptions. It draws on a narrative review and comparative synthesis of academic literature, policy documents and food-system strategies identified through targeted searches, citation searching and purposive wider reading. Selected national, regional, local and Indigenous-led approaches were compared to identify recurring governance arrangements, capabilities and challenges.

The literature identifies no single best model: countries use ministries, interdepartmental mechanisms, stakeholder councils and layered arrangements. Three requirements recur: authority to coordinate and act; representation and legitimacy to support participation, trust and accountability; and explicit mechanisms for managing trade-offs across desired outcomes. Effective governance must also support priority-setting, coordination, implementation, monitoring and review.

International models offer no single blueprint for Aotearoa New Zealand. However, a layered architecture provides a potential starting point for a context-specific arrangement combining Te Tiriti-based Māori–Crown partnership, portfolio coordination, stakeholder participation, enduring technical capacity, explicit trade-off processes and public accountability.