Minister for Agriculture Damien O’Connor has recently come out blaming farmers anger on “misinformation”. He may well be correct in his assessment, (although I suspect it goes beyond this). However, if it is due to this then I would suggest that a large part of the blame can be laid at his feet.
As the Minister overseeing the agriculture sector, he has seemed to be removed from the realities of the policies of his government showing a distinct lack of knowledge of the content of the governments HWEN policy and the impact of both that and the earlier changes to international ownership of land especially around plantation forestry.
Two classic gaps (some might say gaffs) were not having a grasp on the amount of farmland being converted to forestry (carbon farming or to be harvested, although some fail to see the difference given the thirty or so years that could transpire between the decision to harvest or not) and trying to defend the 20% loss of sheep and beef farmland as fluctuations of the market when the governments own policy paper clearly says it is a potential result of the HWEN policy.
The now finished consultation process has resulted in over 19,000 submissions and if the Minister was unclear of what was irking farmers before, a synopsis of these should provide some clarity for him.
The lack of understanding shown by the minister has to be of concern to farmers and others involved in policies around reducing emission as there is an obvious disconnect which needs to be rectified. As stated by Beef +Lamb NZ Chair Andrew Morrison “Farmers simply don’t understand why a sector which has reduced its emissions by 30% since 1990 has arguably been climate neutral for lamb over the last 20 years, has increased exports by 250% since 1990 and has protected 1.4million hectares of native bush, while also being a backbone employer in rural communities, and underpinning the economy during covid-19, has seemingly been abandoned even punished by the governments proposal”.
A lack of understanding leading to anger is not due to “misinformation”, it is due either poor communication or bad policy or perhaps both.
The minister who is meant to be representing the agricultural sector is appearing to be increasingly out of touch with his constituents. What the government comes back with from the consultation submission process is going to be the next measure of how government view the livestock sector. One of the problems in my view is the apparent reluctance by policy makers to separate dairying from other forms of livestock farms. Their logic being that many of the dairy farms come out of sheep and beef and therefore are still ‘tarred with the same brush’ and as a result both sectors are jointly responsible for their externalities and get treated the same. This is becoming an increasingly flawed view point.
Forestry do not continue to wear the ‘burden’ of the sheep and beef sector which is a land use change in one direction, so why should sheep and beef be penalised for a land use change in the other, in this case to dairying?
So, while the technical calculations for all livestock are similar the industries carbon footprints from 1990 are quite different and when the 20% versus 5% reductions due to the HWEN policies on sheep and beef versus dairy then the combining of emissions really starts to create disproportional effects. Penalising sheep and beef out of existence I doubt is what the government plans but with a minister asleep at the wheel it could be very well what the outcome is.
Minister O’Connor has been very active wearing his trade hat but having additional trade opportunities will be cold comfort to the red meat industries if they are no longer in business due to flawed policies. This would be particularly galling as AgResearch have calculated that New Zealand sheep and beef farmer emissions are around half of that of competing countries. So much for utilising our competitive advantage.
New phosphate sources
A piece of more positive news on different note. There appears to be an opportunity for New Zealand to be able to access rock phosphate from a new and closer source. Australia has developed a new mine at Ardmore in Queensland. Ravensdown has imported a trial shipment to experiment with. Having a mine on our door step should help alleviate some of the geo-political issues associated with some of the current sources and involve less transport costs. Near Mt Isa the rock would be exported out of Townsville. The mine is reported to have over 10 million tonnes of phosphate rock deposit available. New Zealand applied about 154,000 tonnes of phosphate in 2019 and Australia imported around 214,000 tonnes (2014) so the mine would supply (only) 30 years’ worth if more was not found and added to it.
There is/was a phosphate mine south of Dunedin along side SH1. The Ewing phosphate company was opened in 1902 and last mined in 1955. Perhaps with current phosphate prices it may be economic again some time in the future. It was said to be the only substantial (land based) phosphate deposit in Australasia; we now know that not to be true.
10 Comments
He is toeing the party line quite obviously. Just like other Labour mps ignore what their electorate, their constituents, think about the three waters sham policy. They don’t have the backbone to speak the people’s voice anymore than this minister will admit the facts of how his government is assaulting the livelihoods of farmers, their families and communities and the associated service industry and resultantly, ultimately the very viability of our nation.
Where have you been solardb. Our "progressive" government has been bringing out radical proposals affecting a wide range of industry sectors. Folk involved in health, local government, and certainly the many primary industries have been reeling under the avalanche of new legislative proposals. Not surprising they are all complaining about issues of short notice, radical, one size fits all, centralising, clearly going ahead no matter what the reaction and so on.
In short, everyone is reacting rather than putting forward their own proposals.
Secondly, as you may have noticed if you have watched Country Calendar, our primary industries are not monolithic. They are hugely diverse with many different needs, environmental effects, financial implications, etc.. A piece of land, for example is not a "sheep farm" per se. It is a land resource that may be currently used to raise sheep, perhaps for many years, but history tells us NZ in particular needs to be light in its feet, ready to adapt to international realities. So the last thing we need is statutory regulation which makes change difficult.
For all the above it is tad unrealistic to expect one, clear "proposal" from complex and independent industry sectors....even if they thought our know it all government would listen.
Cannot imagine that any individual that has any meaningful connection with the primary production sector that founded and grew New Zealand, will have a future vote for Labour for reasons that need not be explained. That the rural community turned government seats over to them in 2020 was a horrendous mistake that will never be repeated.
No matter how many times B+L try to claim it, sheep farmers, sheep farms and lamb production are not carbon neutral. Not even "arguably climate neutral over the last 20 years". The report commissioned by B+L and used to make this claim was debunked here:
https://environment.govt.nz/publications/net-emissions-and-removals-fro…
And that's before applying the concept of additionality in carbon reward schemes. I think by this stage you'd have to call it a deliberate misinformation strategy - not by farmers, but by their sector representatives.
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