For more than 30 years Hawaiʻi has recognized the need to diversify agricultural production, boost self-sufficiency and reduce food insecurity in a state with some of the highest grocery prices in the nation.

But it’s never had anything approaching a comprehensive plan for how to help farmers grow more food and earn a better living, while also making healthy groceries more affordable for residents.

That’s something lawmakers are now trying to change.

The Legislature voted this session to form a permanent team to systematically identify and address problems in the food system, a term used to describe the web of work and infrastructure behind what people eat, from production to consumption.

While the state has funneled millions to the agricultural sector in recent years, most efforts have been piecemeal and have had little success in moving the state toward meeting its lofty goals for food production.

Agriculture and anti-hunger advocates are welcoming the group’s creation with cautious optimism.

“It has been far too long,” said Albie Miles, associate professor of food systems at the University of Hawaiʻi West Oʻahu. The state could have made significantly more progress if planning had started earlier, he said.

The new group, which will include lawmakers, state officials and representatives from across the food system, is expected to come up with detailed plans for addressing Hawaiʻi’s dwindling food production, growing household food insecurity and gaps in disaster preparedness.

The team was originally slated to sit under the Department of Agriculture or the governor’s office, but will now fall under the state Agribusiness Development Corp.

The group, which still requires the governor’s approval, will have a head start in addressing the statewide issues because of work completed by the temporary Sustainable Food Systems Working Group last year, which focused on assessing community needs throughout the islands.

It identified a number of priorities, including a need for greater collaboration among state agencies, Hawaiʻi’s county governments and food producers, to ensure the state makes better progress.

The overarching goal is to address problems across the entire food system.

“We can’t afford to be siloed in this work,” said Amanda Shaw, a consultant who coordinated the temporary group.

The new working group is also supposed to track and measure the state’s progress toward its food goals by collecting new data and partnering with organizations such as Hawaiʻi Green Growth — a public-private sustainability initiative — to monitor changes.

“We really want to have information, evidence and data,” Shaw said, “to make the case for these road maps we’re going to make.”

Joining The Counties

Local food production advocates have long lamented a disconnect between the state’s goals and actions. One example is setting a goal of doubling food production by 2030 while providing the state Department of Agriculture less than 1% of the state budget.

But the past two years have buoyed food systems advocates, as resolutions, bills and millions in appropriations have been put toward local agricultural production.

The ultimate goal is to find ways to address problems in the food supply, such as affordability or supply chain vulnerabilities, through comprehensive policies and funding measures. That will require working with the counties and communities, many of which are formulating their own plans to address local food issues.

Maui County released its latest plan in April. The City and County of Honolulu is crafting its first food plan for Oʻahu, a draft of which could be ready by the end of the year, said county food security and sustainability manager Jason Shon.

The state plan is expected to help counties achieve shared food goals, while also moving the state forward in a more unified way. A large facet of producing the plan, Shaw said, will be identifying hard-to-reach objectives at the county level, then crafting state policies to help.

The state plan is also expected to address the impact of climate change on food producers and to tackle health equity challenges, such as the disproportionately high rates of diet-related diseases among Pacific Islanders, members of the 2024 group said.

Disaster preparedness will be part of Oʻahu’s food plan, as the public raises concerns about supply chains and long-term food storage. According to a 2024 study co-authored by Miles, just 12% of Hawaiʻi households have enough food, water and medical supplies stashed away to survive for two weeks in an emergency.

“In order to address one of those things, we have to think about the food system as a whole,” Shon said.

Once published, the Oʻahu plan will set the agenda for the county’s future food policies.

The 2024 working group identified five key problems to resolve moving forward, including the need for a permanent planning team, a lack of consistent and state-specific food and farming data, weak biosecurity and invasive species controls and insufficient support for institutional initiatives, such as increasing local food in school meals.

Lawmakers made investments in biosecurity in the past session and allocated funds to improve farming irrigation and food processing facilities. But the state killed legislation that would have revitalized Hawaiʻi’s barebones agricultural statistics program, which the report suggested.

Farmers say they do not have the necessary data to make key decisions about their crops, from deciding what to plant to knowing where to plant them.

Taking A Bigger View Of Hawaiʻi’s Needs

Many of the state’s efforts to date have focused on increasing local food production after the collapse of Hawaiʻi’s sugar and pineapple industries.

But to make real progress, the state needs to look at its entire food system — from the number of families who can’t afford food to the high cost of doing business and how prepared officials are to respond to a large-scale environmental disaster, according to the statewide advocacy group Transforming Hawaiʻi Food Systems Together.

“We cannot conflate agricultural development with food systems development,” Miles said. “The agricultural sector of Hawaiʻi is not the food system.”

Looking at the food system means taking into account a much broader range of factors that influence nutrition, food access and community health. Food security, meanwhile, is achieved when people have access to sufficient, nutritious food at all times.

And the new plans will ultimately aim to address that larger, more comprehensive, view of the food system.

Local food production is an important part of the system and Miles said he is “100% supportive” of the state’s goal of doubling the amount of food grown locally.

“I equally want to ensure that people have access to food, any food, local and imported food,” Miles said. “We have too high of a rate of household food insecurity to be exclusively focused on just doubling local food production.”

That is where initiatives such as the Double Up Bucks program, known in Hawaiʻi as Da Bux, come in. The program supports local farmers and low-income households by doubling the spending power for Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) beneficiaries when they purchase locally grown or produced food.

Food systems planner Hunter Heaivilin says the pairing of economic development and planning makes the Da Bux program unique, calling it a “silver bullet” because it benefits farmers, reduces hunger and helps boost the local economy by leveraging federal funding.

The Farm to Families program is one more recent example of that kind of policy, according to Shaw. That program, which lawmakers gave $1 million for the next two years, funnels state funding to food banks to buy local food. That program is slated to help alleviate the strain of $300 billion in predicted federal cuts to SNAP, used by more than 160,000 Hawaiʻi residents last year, while increasing demand for local farmers’ produce.

Da Bux and Farm to Families are an example of the “win-win policies” the state needs to continue identifying to strengthen the food system, Shaw said. And, she added, it seems momentum for similar ideas is growing.

Coordinating Better

Another key factor in developing a unified plan for the state will be examining existing programs, such as the Agribusiness Development Corp.’s Central Oʻahu Agriculture and Food Hub, to better coordinate efforts.

Based in Whitmore Village on Oʻahu, the hub is slated to receive at least $28 million from the state in the coming fiscal year, pending the governor’s sign-off.

The hub is designed to address a list of supply chain difficulties by building shared processing facilities under one roof so producers can process their crops and reduce waste. It’s a model that could inform future work on other islands.

The $28 million is a small portion of the state’s investments in the corporation since its creation in 1994, a move intended to transition Hawaiʻi from its historical reliance on plantations as drivers of the agricultural economy.

Since then, the state-owned corporation has been criticized for being ineffective and working in obscurity while receiving significant state funding for land and infrastructure acquisitions. Those investments have recently been driven by Ways And Means Committee chair Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz of Wahiawā.

Housing the new group under the corporation has made some advocates wary and optimistic at the same time.

“It was envisaged as being on the gubernatorial level,” Shaw said. “That’s something I think the working group will have to consider — if that makes sense in the future.”

The cross-agency team’s meetings will likely be subject to public meeting laws, which the agribusiness corporation’s legal team is currently reviewing.

Still, having a planning entity under an economic development agency could bode well for the state, food systems planner Heaivilin said, especially because there never seems to have been a formalized plan for that project before.

Having a state entity with both the funding and direction to make changes to the food economy, provides “an opportunity to have a little bit more concerted impact” on the state’s food system, Heaivilin said.

“Hawai‘i Grown” is funded in part by grants from the Stupski Foundation, Ulupono Fund at the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.