O‘ahu is building its first comprehensive plan focused on food systems. It is the local government’s first attempt at formalizing its role in identifying and addressing food and agriculture issues on the Hawaiian island.
The five-year Oʻahu Food Systems Plan—led by the City and County of Honolulu’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency (CCSR)—outlines 10 broad strategies for the island’s government agencies. Following the release of the draft plan in May, CCSR received hundreds of comments during its public comment phase, ranging from calls for more accountability mechanisms to clarification on the plan’s integration of Hawaiian values. The office now works to incorporate suggestions and get a final draft adopted by the Honolulu City Council by the end of the year, according to CCSR’s Food Systems Fellow Kaitlyn Judd.
The plan’s strategies primarily focus on reducing food insecurity, promoting food sovereignty, and ensuring the long-term resilience of Oʻahu’s natural resources and small food producers. One of CCSR’s first priorities is the creation of a working group across numerous Oʻahu public agencies, which would help the government avoid redundant or conflicting programs as well as compile resources, knowledge, and funding.
“A key goal is building the capacity needed to effectively coordinate and implement these actions,” Judd tells Food Tank. “The collaborative process used to develop the draft plan has already helped to establish connections between departments and provide a solid foundation for this ongoing coordination.”
The draft plan contains around 70 actions for local government, each of which belongs to one of the 10 strategies. Many proposals build on existing government and nonprofit work to address gaps in the island’s food system.
One action under the strategy to “enhance market opportunities and value chain coordination for local food,” for example, would expand the O‘ahu Good Food Program, which aims to support local business by making it easier for institutions to buy food from O‘ahu’s small and medium-sized producers at scale. In Hawaiʻi, where around 90 percent of food is imported, according to the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, local institutional purchasing offers a unique opportunity to boost the state’s economy and build food system resilience.
Every year, food producers brace for the impacts of seasonal Kona low storms, which can cause massive structural damage and financial losses. Farmers in Hawaiʻi also pay higher labor costs than those on the U.S. mainland due to the smaller scale of their agriculture operations and struggle to compete with lower prices from producers in states like California, according to Albie Miles—a sustainable food systems professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at West O‘ahu and the Director of its Transforming Hawaiʻi’s Food System Together initiative.
“You start to combine these things—high rates of household food insecurity, low rates of emergency and commercial food storage, critical points of vulnerability on the south shore of O‘ahu,” Miles tells Food Tank. “If any of that is disturbed as a result of a hurricane, for example, then the structural bottleneck—the port of Honolulu—is disrupted, and that interferes with our ability to import and distribute food across the entire state.”
Other non-governmental organizations, including the Hawai‘i Good Food Alliance (HGFA), are partnering directly with CCSR to carry out the plan’s action items. Around one in three households in Hawaiʻi experience food insecurity—nearly triple the national average, per the Hawaiʻi Food Bank’s most recent data. As part of its strategy on food security, CCSR is leveraging services provided by the HGFA to reduce administrative and logistical barriers that might prevent farmers markets and other food hubs from accepting federal food assistance benefits.
Another action item in the strategy details how local government will continue to explore subway stations as “visible demonstrations of sustainable food practices,” like hosting food distribution events and growing culturally significant plants. In its strategy focused on food-producing gardens, the plan also identifies public housing as a crucial site for community gardening, and suggests that Honolulu pursue public and private funding for growing spaces. Proposals like these identify elements of the built environment as potential places for food systems change.
If adopted by Honolulu City Council, the Oʻahu Food Systems Plan will likely become the island’s primary outline for addressing a range of agriculture and food issues over the next five years. Though its action items would remain as guidance, not requirements, Judd says the plan can serve as a long-term framework and path toward idea-sharing across disciplines and sectors.
“Unless there are planning processes like the Oʻahu Food Systems Plan or other state and regional food system planning initiatives to implement policy recommendations, all this research that happens in higher education just sits there and it’s never implemented into actionable strategies,” Miles says.
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Photo courtesy of the City and County of Honolulu’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency
