WILLIAM BEETHAM
It’s a bit of a kick in the guts to farmers, rural communities and environmentalists that the government continues to jam its finger on the scales in favour of carbon farming, rather than pursuing balance and fairness on land use.
It will be troubling to most New Zealanders who recognize the importance of our rural communities and the meat and wool sector to export earnings, the economy and our social fabric, that the government has failed to make foreign investors looking to make a quick buck through carbon farming meet the ‘benefit to NZ’ test that applies when overseas purchasers buy farmland.
If this is about forestry, why can’t the government treat the two land uses in an even-handed manner? It is encouraging that former Conservation Minister and Greens MP Eugenie Sage finds herself aligned with Federated Farmers, demonstrating this is a much wider issue concerning all New Zealanders. She specifically acknowledged Feds in her address to Parliament at the second reading of the Overseas Investment (Forestry) Amendment Bill this week. She said:
“Federated Farmers and particularly their president in the Wairoa area, Toby Williams, really highlighted the impact on farming communities of the major change in land use, particularly in areas like the East Cape and around Wairoa, where you've got the hollowing out of the community when land goes from sheep and beef farming to forestry.
"The families go, the school closes, the infrastructure servicing the remaining farms becomes more expensive, and so that whole hollowing-out has quite significant social impacts.
“…the other area where we think that it's justified applying the stronger farm land test is just the major impacts that have occurred with forestry as a land use on the East Coast. One only has to remember Tolaga Bay and all of that slash coming down the rivers.”
The Greens raised a Supplementary Order Paper with changes that would require overseas purchasers of production forestry land to meet the ‘farmland test’ criteria (i.e. that the purchase would result in economic benefits for New Zealand, benefits to the national environment, continue or improve public access, for example). In other words, an even playing field. But this failed to gain enough support.
This comes on top of the government ‘kicking the can down the road’ on making a decision on proposals to prevent exotic forests from registering in the permanent forest category of the ETS by 2023, a measure that was intended to address the issue of planting for carbon farming only (with no intention of harvesting).
Yes, there were complex issues to work out for Māori landowners and farmers, but these are intergenerational land owners who focus on long term benefit not making a quick buck. We could have had a moratorium while the details were thrashed out to deliver the best outcomes for rural communities, our iwi partners and New Zealand. Instead, as Feds, Beef+Lamb NZ, environmental groups and many others have noted, the Government has decided to kick for touch, rolling out the red carpet for speculators interested in fence-to-fence monocultural pine conversions across New Zealand at the expense of the environment and people of Aotearoa New Zealand.
