By calculating the weekly deficit in people’s budgets, a new report shows how those receiving benefits or working for minimum wage often can’t pay for food after the cost of fixed expenses.   

One in five working-age New Zealanders doesn’t earn enough to feed themselves and their family well, new research indicates.

The report, from Kore Hiakai, a collective of organisations working to tackle hunger, looked at the basic living costs for households in Aotearoa, taking the average expenses for a single adult, a single parent and two parents with kids to show some of the demographics most impacted by food cost increases, as well as the fixed cost of other services like housing and fuel. 

Using data from IRD and Tenancy Services and drawing on experiences from the Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch City Missions, the Salvation Army and a collective of other social service organisations, the report shows that children, especially of single parents; mothers, who community food organisations say most commonly seek food assistance; tertiary students, including those undertaking unpaid placements; and older people, including those without secure housing, are all more likely to need food assistance.

 ‘You can’t budget your way out of a broken system’

The Ministry of Social Development’s food grant, used by many, is supposed to be “a one-off payment to help you pay an essential or emergency cost”. But if your income is chronically less than you need to survive, using this emergency grant to pay for food becomes a habit. 

The Kore Hiakai report highlights that in the 18 months to March 2024, the MSD Studylink call centre saw a 15% increase in applications of special needs grants for food, indicating a rise in students who couldn’t afford to eat. “There’s a narrative that students have always done it tough, but this shows just how tough it is,” says Jennie Sim, a researcher with Kore Hiakai. 

When MSD denies emergency grants for food, applicants are often advised to try local food banks. “People constantly go back and forth from special needs grants from MSD to food parcels from community organisations,” Sim says. That’s an obvious sign that for many people, inability to afford food isn’t a one-off; it’s a consistent pattern. “You can’t budget your way out of a broken system,” she adds.

It doesn’t help that government funding in the budget for food support has been drastically reduced, with many food banks and distributors feeling the pinch. 

“Come 1 January, we have a very significant problem, which is totally inadequate funding to meet the demand for food that we are seeing,” Auckland city missioner Helen Robinson told RNZ last month. In the last year several food distribution services around the country, from Auckland to Nelson to Christchurch, have had to close or turn people away. 

What’s the cost of malnutrition?

What we eat is intimately connected to other questions, like how much housing costs, and how much people get paid. Regional centres, like Gisborne and Stratford, have seen bigger increases in housing costs in the last year than cities like Auckland, according to Infometrics. Decent food is often what has to be sacrificed after fixed costs eat up most of a household budget. “You can’t change your power bill, you can’t change your rent – you can change whether or not you eat adequately,” Sim says. 

How much income people make is a key factor in whether they eat well, with a single adult on a jobseeker benefit having a deficit of $138.86 after average housing and living costs are taken into account, and an adult receiving a supported living payment and looking after two kids having only $20.91 after the average cost of fixed expenses. Of course, people’s situations vary, and don’t always cleave to the average, but the data compiled by Kore Hiakai shows just how thin the margins are for many people, and how often food can be a crunch point. 

The data about food costs used in the report is taken from an Otago University Food Cost study, an annual examination of how much it costs to eat well from the university’s department of nutrition. The study includes a “basic” basket of food – apples, carrots, packaged bread, canned fish, mild cheese. The “moderate” cost basket includes peaches, mushrooms, multigrain bread and muesli. The most expensive basket includes salami, specialty cheeses, berries and salmon. The 2023 edition of the study shows consistent increases from previous years; while between 2014 and 2020, the cost of food for adults stayed in the same range (ie between $68 and $75 for an adult man in Auckland), there was a distinct jump in 2023, with food costs increasing by more than $20 per week in some demographics. 

It’s possible to choose to eat less food for a week, but in the long term, not being nourished properly is corrosive. People who are malnourished get sick more easily, take longer to recover from injuries, feel more tired and find it difficult to concentrate. While food that has a relatively low cost per calorie, like bread, can meet energy needs, protein and fresh vegetables are more expensive, even though these provide vital nutrients for a healthy body. 

The big picture

“It’s not just health – malnutrition affects all areas of a society,” says Belinda Robb, a researcher at World Vision. She helped write another recent report, this one looking at the economic impact of malnourishment, especially for women and girls. It demonstrates how far-reaching malnutrition can be. In New Zealand, according to the report, malnutrition leads to 2,000 lost years of school and costs $897m of lost income – taking into account damage to productivity and potential, the impact on the health system, the way that malnutrition makes it harder for people to learn. This chimes with other depressing statistics on New Zealand’s prevalence of food insecurity, like a UN report in July showing that food insecurity in New Zealand impacts 16.4% of the population. According to the New Zealand Health Survey, between 2021/22 and 2022/23, the proportion of children living in households where the food runs out sometimes or often increased from 14.4% to 21.3%. Tamariki Māori and Pasifika were the worst affected, with 35.1% and 39.6% respectively living in such households.

Globally, the picture is more dire, with $1.6 trillion of economic gains lost to the impact of malnutrition on girls and women each year. “There’s a cumulative economic effect – it’s significant for an individual to experience malnutrition, but it also impacts their whole community,” Robb says. Places with lots of refugees or war have especially high rates of malnutrition; Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh receive food aid from World Vision and other organisations, as they aren’t allowed to work, and don’t have land to grow food. 

In New Zealand, as in other countries, food provided at school is one way that governments and NGOs can help make sure kids are getting enough to eat. With lots of focus on New Zealand’s school lunch programme this year after a budget cut, the nutritional standards of the cheaper meals on offer have been questioned by teachers.  

“We see a lot of short-term thinking in the government at the moment,” Sim says. “Food banks, social supermarkets, even food rescue – they’re band-aid solutions. We need system change that builds towards kai sovereignty.”

Immediate solutions, like therapeutic food delivered to malnourished children through humanitarian aid internationally, and food banks in Aotearoa, remain necessary. “It’s not enough to only think about nutrition,” Robb says. “Tackling malnutrition is about individuals and households, communities, health systems, food systems – it requires action at all levels.”

Kore Hiakai wants to focus on a future where no one is going hungry at all, something they examined in a recent project about reindigenising food, or kai motuhake. “People who can’t get a food grant from MSD, and can’t get food from a food bank – they just go hungry,” Sims says. “People in these situations are incredibly creative and resilient, but we could do so much more so that it stops happening.”