Experts are calling for a national food plan to tackle problems of food insecurity – despite the country producing enough food to feed 40 million people a year.
New Zealand ranks 14th in the world for food self-sufficiency – but you wouldn’t always know it by our supermarket shelves.
So how much food are we actually producing, and who is eating it all?
40 million
As a nation of five million people, New Zealand feeds more than 40 million global consumers each year, according to New Zealand Trade and Enterprise.
We have a strong horticulture and agriculture sector where most of our food comes from, that is then exported.
Stats NZ said last year there were 50,000 farms in New Zealand covering 13.6m hectares.
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New Zealand ranked 14th out of 113 countries for food security on the Global Food Security Index (GFSI).
The GFSI was developed by Economist Impact and supported by Corteva Agriscience. It evaluates food security in 113 countries across four key pillars: affordability, availability, quality and safety, and sustainability and adaptation.
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We ranked ninth for food affordability, 22nd for availability, 43rd for quality and safety and third for suitability and adaption.
Within availability, we received a zero for having no food security or food policy commitments, a zero for no food strategy and zero for no food security agency. The average score for all countries across the three categories was 47.1, 60.2 and 32.7, respectively.
52.2 billion
New Zealand exported a record $52.2 billion in food and fibre exports in the year to June 30 last year.
“This will be the first time we’ve hit more than $50b in food and fibre exports, and an increase of almost 10% ($4.6b) on the previous year,” Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor said.
20.6 billion
In New Zealand, 95% of our dairy product is exported.
Milk powder, butter, and cheese were New Zealand’s largest export commodity group for 2022, making up 28% of total exports over the year, Stats NZ data showed.
The combined export value of this group increased $3.5b (21%), to reach a new high of $20.6b.
This increase was price-driven, as quantities fell 7.3% over the same period.
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Meat also contributed to the rise in annual exports last year, up 12% compared to the year before.
Beef rose $811m (20%). The top three destinations for beef were China ($2.1b), the United States of America ($1.3b), and Japan ($349m).
New Zealanders get to eat about 13% of the beef produced in New Zealand, according to Beef + Lamb New Zealand and Stats NZ data from September 2019 to September 2020.
90 million
We export a lot of fruit, too, although quantities exported last year were down 7.7%.
New Zealanders only eat 10% of the kiwifruit grown here. In the 2021/2022 year Zespri sold 175 million trays overseas. There were 331,903 tonnes of apples exported in the year to June last year, according to Stats NZ.
Only 15% of onions grown in NZ stay here, and there have been a number of shortages thanks to poor weather last year.
299 million
Many bottles of vino were exported last year. Wine exports rose $299m (15%), with both quantities and price per litre rising. There were 266.1 million litres of wine exported.
Chocolate exports also rose significantly, up 68%, while seeds, raw peanuts, and soya flour fell by $47 million.
In 2020, there were 10 tonnes of chocolate exported.
