Reporters at work during the 2025 Jefferson Fellowship trip.
Photo: Supplied
RNZ reporter Kate Green has a strong focus on environmental issues but more recently her attention has been on the future of food security and lessons from Southeast Asia.
She travelled there last month as part of a Jefferson Fellowship and answered some questions from the Country Life team.
What is the Jefferson Fellowship?
The Jefferson Fellowship is a three-week programme run by the East-West Centre in Hawai’i, giving 12 journalists from all over the world – Mongolia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, United States and me – access to key groups and players on a particular topic. This year, it was food security.
The three places that best demonstrated issues and solutions for food security in the eyes of the programme’s creators were Honolulu, Indonesia – where we were in Jakarta for a week – before going over to Thailand, where we visited Chiang Rai and Bangkok.
RNZ reporter and Jefferson fellow Kate Green.
Photo: Supplied
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What were your impressions from our neighbour in the Pacific, Hawai’i? What food security challenges did they have and are they responding to them?
I was so warmed to notice the similarities in the cultures between New Zealand with our Māori indigenous population and that of Hawai’i. Throughout the week I noticed the little ways it was similar or different in terms of language or world view, in terms of being part of the environment instead of using it and that came up quite a lot when we talked about food production.
It’s definitely a problem that Hawai’i only has two weeks of food on-hand at any given time. And it’s very expensive, as everything’s imported. This leaves them vulnerable to natural disasters.
We learned more about how it’s led to many seeing the merit in a swing back to producing native crops locally – crops like taro and breadfruit. One of the stand-outs for me was when we went to a lo’i kalo, which is a taro patch essentially.
It was part of this big non-profit restoration project, Kākoʻo ʻŌiwi.They produce fresh produce, they do educational visits, they run workshops and they have community work days.
Over the past 15 years they’ve restored several acres of this taro patch and they have a focus on “agroecology”. Basically how do we design sustainable food and farm systems that work with the environment rather than taking from it.
Dr Kawika Winter at the lo’i kalo at Kākoʻo ʻŌiwi.
Photo: Supplied
We spoke to Dr Kawika Winter there and he had a story that was so emblematic of the problems in conservation.
Essentially, as people started to restore this wetland and planted the taro patch they noticed these beautiful native birds had started to come back. The agency that deals with the wildlife legislation side of things on the island said ‘great you have these birds, let’s protect them – you must keep a 30m distance from these birds and this nest’.
That was the whole taro patch. So they stopped maintaining it and it overgrew with weeds and no longer had its function as a food source, as well as degrading as an environment, and so the birds left. That meant they could restore it again but then the birds came back.
It’s a story about the bureaucracy that puts a stop to what are usually very old ways of doing things – usually indigenous practices – and the tension of how to get around them.
Empowering small-scale local growers and farmers, often using traditional indigenous techniques, seems to be another theme picked up on during your time in Indonesia?
In Jakarta, we visited the flagship store of a company called Javara and it was run by a former lawyer. Her name is Heliante Hillman.
Her MO is to connect farmers to buyers. She was a lawyer and she was being driven around giving advice to farmers that were struggling in the market. The way she tells it, her husband was getting sick of driving her around and said ‘these people don’t need a lawyer, they need access to a market that is respectful and dignified’. So she made them that market.
She told us the story about how she got a panicked late night call from a farmer with tonnes and tonnes of vegetables that were in the path of a volcano which was about to destroy all his crops. In a nearby village there’s a pasta maker – so she connected the two and they made 14 different types of noodles in all different colours.
She told us that the noodles had also been a solution to help one mother get her children to eat vegetables, and Heliante said she knew she was onto a winner after doing a cooking presentation for a group of Italians who were very impressed.
Heliante Hillman, founder of Javara.
Photo: Supplied
And what did you learn from your time in Thailand?
In Chiang Rai, in the very north of the country – so beautiful – we got to meet a couple of farmers who, when they were kids, their parents were growing opium.
It’s a tough life growing opium. It’s unsafe, you don’t really know who you’re dealing with because it’s an illicit trade. It’s a little bit dangerous, people might be carrying guns.
Pichit Boonyuenpanakul a coffee farmer in Wawee whose parents switched from growing opium in the 1980s.
Photo: Supplied
Wiwat from the Aka tribe pictured in his greenhouse in Wawee in Chiang Rai.
Photo: Supplied
They’ve switched to growing fresh vegetables in greenhouses and coffee which I can confirm, even by Wellington standards, is great. The security that’s come with that is obviously a big bonus. It also means they get an income year round if they’re growing different crops.
There’s a lot of doors that have opened to them – there’s a lot of community groups and NGOs, and government support to transition those farmers into more effective and sustainable crops.
It’s interesting that everywhere is looking into the issue of land use. And in New Zealand that’s ‘where do we put our housing developments so they’re not using the best land that could be used for growing things’.
It was very similar in Thailand. There’s also the issue of land ownership and indigenous views not always aligning with what the government considers for use and ownership.
It’s really important to make sure those yields are good, make sure they’re producing stuff all year-round and can feed their families. Ultimately that works out better for everyone because the farmers are earning, the government isn’t needing to support so many people and people are healthier because they’re eating locally grown food.
Learn more:
You can learn more about the Jefferson Fellowship, here.
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