Access to food has become another of our inequalities.
There has been a lot of attention on rising inequality, both globally and in New Zealand over the past year.
Oxfam recently released a report in which it projects that by 2016, the richest 1% will own half of the world's wealth.
Late last year, the OECD report on income inequality and growth claimed that the single biggest drag on economic growth was a rising gap between rich and the poor and lower-middle-class households.
It estimated that in New Zealand, rising inequality was responsible for reducing economic growth by more than 10% over the past 20 years.
In this context, we hear a lot about the housing affordability and housing quality crisis, but less so about access to healthy and nutritious food.
As a wealthy country, we perhaps take it for granted that hunger and under-nutrition is not something to worry about.
However, with rising inequality and increasing poverty, the number of families that are food insecure remains high.
The definition of food security adopted at the World Food Summit in 1996 states that food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.
This definition reinforces the multiple dimensions of food security beyond simple availability of food to incorporate physical and economic access as part of the social and political contexts in which food is grown, distributed and consumed.
It provides meaning to the right to food movement that was included in the UN declaration of human rights in 1948.
A goal of achieving food security is something that most people would aspire to.
In New Zealand, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction.
While data on foodbank usage nationally is fragmented and difficult to put together, estimates from just the Salvation Army's 63 foodbanks indicate that in 2014 more than 55,000 food parcels were distributed to more than 28,000 families.
Clearly, the right to food is not being achieved by for all families.
How do we provoke change?
Are notions of a just and sustainable food system for all a dream?
Are we willing to personally get involved in closing the equity gap between rich and poor (and food secure and insecure) both within our communities and across countries?It is not impossible.
Belo Horizonte, in Brazil, committed itself to ensuring that all of its citizens had a right to food in the 1990s.
At the time, about 11% of the city's population was living below the poverty level and nearly 20% of its children were going hungry.
Food security and the right to food were made a city priority.
Multiple efforts were made to use the city's resources to facilitate improved access to food for all citizens by strengthening the relationships between farmers and consumers.
One such example involved opening up public space throughout the city to family farmers to sell directly to consumers.
By increasing market access for small producers, farmers' incomes improved.
By selling directly to consumers, the distributor mark-ups were eliminated, making food cheaper for consumers, but also providing access to fresh, healthy food.
Belo Horizonte is clearly a different context to New Zealand, but there are many important lessons.
However, the most important is also the most easily transferable.
That is to refuse to accept that food insecurity is inevitable.
It simply results from our failure to address inequities in our food system and in our society.
• Sean Connelly is a lecturer in the University of Otago department of geography. Each week in this column, one of a panel of writers addresses issues of sustainability.
