Lay summary
The Tairāwhiti region produces an enormous amount of food yet many Māori in the region experience food insecurity. Te Hauora o Turanganui a Kiwa Ltd (Turanga Health), a Māori health provider in Gisborne, is embarking on a programme of work to explore food sovereignty and increase food security. This includes establishing a garden on iwi land to enable therapeutic gardening and harvesting, and establishing school vegetable gardens.
Researchers from the University of Otago and Turanga Health would work together to develop measures of food sovereignty and food security that take into account the cultural and geographical context. These would include traditional household-level measures of food security, and wider iwi-level measures around sovereignty and food production. Development of measures would involve literature review, discussion and consultation. The resulting measures could then be used in a wider project to measure the impact of Turanga Health programmes.