Reflections on food policy in the context of healthy and sustainable diets

Abstract

Governments are urged to make significant changes to food policies to reorient food production and consumption to support healthy and sustainable food systems and diets. New Zealand, like many countries, is under pressure to address the deleterious effects of its food system on food security, nutrition, and environmental health to meet global sustainable development goals. We completed a systematic policy review to assess how food policies in New Zealand support the transition to sustainable diets by aligning with sustainable diet principles and whether this is enabled through multisectoral collaboration and policy coherence. We analysed New Zealand’s food policies against a sustainable diet framework, examining if policies are aligned with all dimensions: health and nutrition, environmental, sociocultural, and economic. We found that while sustainability is a priority, the economic, environmental, and sociocultural outcomes dominate policies concerned with food production and trade, with little attention given to nutritional health. We also found that the health impacts are often left out of multisectoral collaboration efforts and that there is a lack of coherence between health, food production, and trade sector policies concerning nutrition. These findings suggest that current policies will likely undermine nutrition-related health goals and hinder New Zealand’s ability to shift to sustainable diets and food systems. Further research is required to understand how food policies influence food producer and consumer behaviours and determine how a more coherent and comprehensive sustainability-oriented policy environment shifts behaviours towards more sustainable diets and food systems.