The Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice has recommended that the Honolulu City Council work on four areas to improve food security on Oʻahu: disaster planning, summer feeding programs for children, kūpuna programs, and direct funding for food banks.
This comes after the Hawaiʻi FoodBank’s report identified that a quarter of Oʻahu residents are food insecure.
In Hawaiʻi, only about 15% of people feel prepared for a disaster, and among food-insecure households, that number drops to 6%.
Hawaiʻi Appleseed's Food Equity Analyst Genevieve Mumma encouraged the council to implement a multi-agency feeding plan for disasters.
"We know that in the events of an emergency, in the event of a disaster, which we'd seen with the pandemic, with the Maui wildfires, it's very important to be prepared," Mumma said.
"One of the biggest things with feeding is coordination, so whether that's transportation, how we're getting food from one side of the island to another. And it's working with the state, the county, and also all of our nonprofit partners that are feeding people."
Another suggestion was to give direct support to local food banks. She used Maui County as an example, which has a $400,000 allocation in its budget to the Maui Food Bank.
Councilmember Tyler Dos Santos-Tam added that he was interested in revamping the city’s People's Open Market Program — farmers markets where retailers are encouraged to sell their items at lower rates than retail stores.
