enhancing food security and physical activity for maori, pacific and ...

Enhancing Food Security and Physical Activity for Māori, Pacific and Low-income Peoplessense the ‘Smart Card’ intervention can be regarded as more of an ‘income change’intervention; and the ‘GST removal’ intervention as more of a ‘price change’intervention.There are similarities also between the two proposals. Much the same data, principallyfrom the Household Economic Survey (HES), is necessary for analysing thepracticability of both. The impact of both will be dependent on the same economicparameters, namely price and income elasticities of demand for foodstuffs, and theprice elasticity of supply. Elasticities are discussed further below. For these reasonsthe two proposed interventions are discussed together in this chapter.Which foodstuffs are ‘healthy and nutritious’?The workshop recommendations were couched in terms of ‘healthy basic foods’ and‘healthy nutritious food’. Not all foodstuffs are of high nutritional quality, for instance,many takeaway meals, carbonated drinks, potato crisps, and others. It would seemdesirable that an intervention aimed at reducing food insecurity should also, to theextent possible, aim at improving the nutritional value of household food intake. ‘Fattaxes’ and the like are a potential instrument for improving diets in general, but wouldbe of little use in addressing food insecurity, and are not evaluated in this report.An intervention seeking to improve nutritional value alongside food security mightidentify food categories which are seen in general as ‘nutritious’, such as ‘fruit andvegetables’, and target these commodity groups. Alternatively, it might try to identifymore precisely at possibly quite a detailed level individual foodstuffs, the increasedconsumption of which should be encouraged.It is tempting to target fruit and vegetables, because of widespread public and industryacceptance of this category of foods as healthy, but it is questionable how muchimpact increased consumption from this sub-group alone would have on householdfood security as it is the least consumed food group in food-insecure households. Thealternative would be to also include such foods as, for example, milk, bread, breakfastcereals, and meat, on the grounds that food insecurity commonly includes shortfalls inconsumption of these staple items, as well as reliance on items with poor nutritionalquality. Also, many of the items in these groupings, though not all a , are also of goodnutritional quality.In New Zealand, the University of Otago estimated that a family food costs surveybasket could be used as a starting point for an appropriate ‘basket’ of foodstuffs. 4Going a step further, an accepted nutrient profiling scheme could be applied todetermine eligibility of foods for smart card discounts. Arguably, the most acceptableone would be the proposed Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ)health claims standard. The FSANZ calculator would also be available publicly formanufacturers and retailers to assess whether a specific food met the necessarycriteria. This last variation does bring in added complexity, and would be more difficultto implement in places such as weekend markets. The technology of ‘smart cards’does, however, seem to have advanced far enough to be able to cope with most suchproblems, with perhaps a fall-back allowed to simpler criteria, such as fruit andvegetables and bread, in environments where the technology would be too difficult orexpensive to apply.a Examples of foods in these categories of lesser nutritional value include white bread (half of all breadsold), sugary breakfast cereals, and fatty meats.13