HAWAII'S FOOD FUTURE

No one can say that we are prepared for a supply line food shortage here.  If the supply line fails or slows, we are all in deep kim chee, and I don't mean pickled cabbage.  More like we are all going to get very hungry.

Pretty much all our food is from the mainland, and has to be shipped in.  If you think about it this is actually pretty scary.  That's why we've been talking about diversified agriculture for so many years, but sorry we've done little or nothing to actually do something about it.

The great plantations of yesteryear, which could have been the foundation of a huge diversified agricultural industry, lie fallow, many of them in land bank status waiting for housing developments, condos of courses.   They will make much more money per acre.  Sad that the owners of the plantations have given up and really don't do anything to diversify.  Everyone knows that the cost of farmland is too expensive for small farms and diversified agriculture, but no one wants to give the farmers a break.

Buying the land is too expensive, and leases are too short term for would be farmers to make a go of it.  The banks won't lend on short term leases, so would be farmers can't get the money they need to buy the land, the equipment and the agricultural supplies and for that matter the water and power they need to farm the land, much less the labor.  And even with all that, farming is hard and dirty work even if you really do like the aina, so understandably very few young people want to do it even if they could get the other resources together.  And then, even if you work really hard, you don't make that much money.  So what's left to like?  Pretty much nothing.

If people aren't willing to engage in certain entrepreneurial activities, and those activities would be good or the state, as diversified agriculture would surely be, then it is up to government to incentivize them.  Customarily, incentives are adopted by state government through tax breaks or other financial or regulatory benefits that make it all worthwhile.  Hawaii has trouble with incentives and new industries; we seem rather to prefer a tourism mono-economy.  Act 221, the tech tax credit adopted in the last days of the Cayetano administration, was crushed by the Lingle administration in the ten years that followed.  Tragic.

If you look at incentives that might have helped agriculture, you get pretty much the same story.  Nothing.  The Very Important Lands statute adopted some 20 years ago, has been a failure; the landowners, many of whom were the owners of the plantation lands, have turned their backs on it by not designating important lands.  Clearly, the benefits under that law were not enough to incentivize anyone.  Is there any other agricultural incentive that means anything?  No.  Is there something coming up this session or in the foreseeable future?  If there is anything else going on, it is not ambitious enough to make a difference.

Enter our ThinkTech film, "Scaling Up; Hawaii's Food Future," made by local documentary filmmaker Kimberlee Bassford, who has had a number of successful documentaries over the past few years.  She helped ThinkTech by making this film, with stories of aquaculture and boutique food production, like local rum and chocolate, and some great footage by academics at UH Manoa and local organizations working to make an industry out of it.  The film has high production values and is encouraging in its approach.

The film has been successful.  It was selected by the Hawaii International Film Festival and is being screened even now at this writing.  Further, the film will be broadcast on a number of occasions on PBS Hawaii starting in mid-May, and that's great.  After these screenings, the film will be uploaded for the general public to watch on YouTube, Vimeo and social media.  And with all this it is likely to have an effect on public opinion, to show people that agriculture is in our Hawaii DNA, that we do need to diversify to develop a sector that will actually feed us, and that we should focus on that sooner rather than later.

The film is a great introduction to a topic and an aspiration that has been discussed for 30 years over multiple generations and administration in Hawaii, and hopefully it will reach a generation that can take action on it.  One thing is clear - the conversation is not over, the effort needs more.  This is a subject that must be repeated until it is understood by the public and the government, so there should be, must be, sequels, one after the other to drive the point home. 

 It was great making the film, working with Kim Bassford, HIFF and PBS Hawaii, and we look forward to doing more.  It's a kind of race against time - to raise awareness and generate the community action to scale things up to the point where we can finally, again, feed ourselves.  There is no time to waste.