Government policy which subsidises forestry is a bigger threat to food production, rural communities and the New Zealand economy than the ag-sag of the 1980s.
North Otago was particularly hard-hit by the stripping of subsidies that coincided with high interest rates and soaring inflation.
Many farms were too small to be economic and the district was plagued by recurring droughts.
Predictions that farmers would be driven off the land in great numbers proved to be an exaggeration. But many jobs on farm and in businesses that serviced and supplied them were lost and very few of the farmers’ adult children who left the district for education or work returned.
Farmers gradually adjusted to life without subsidies and are stronger for it. Inflation and interest rates returned to manageable levels, irrigation provided protection from droughts and created jobs on and off farm.
There will be no recovery and resurgence of rural communities when productive farmland is replaced by forests.
Subsidising forestry and making it easier for foreign buyers to buy land for forestry than farming is already killing on-farm jobs.
50 Shades of Green paints the local picture:
- 100,000 stock units sold to forestry in the Wairarapa these last twelve months
- Economic impact on Wairarapa community? Direct spend at $125/stock unit: $12.5m. Plus four times multiplier effect.
- 1,000 hectares sheep/beef farm creates seven jobs.
- 1,000 hectares plantation forestry creates one job.
- Tree planting by temporary immigrants… most of the wages are sent home.
- Rural communities will be decimated.
- Farm land prices have been pushed up by these taxpayer
It’s not just in the Wairarapa and it’s not just farming jobs that are lost. Fewer people on farms means fewer children in schools, fewer people buying locally and fewer work opportunities servicing and supplying farms and farmers.
It means less food produced for the local market and export and less export income.
It is also counter to the Paris Climate Accord which states that climate mitigation should not be at the expense of food production.
This is the motivation for the petition asking that legislation which incentivises the blanket afforestation of farmland be rejected:
. . .There has never been such an imminent threat to food production in New Zealand as that which looms over us in the form of current government policies which align across multiple government portfolios designed to meet specific policy agendas. These agendas combined, create a massive assault on the viability of rural businesses, on sustainable land use, on infrastructure and ultimately on the lives of those living the experience of this assault.
We need your support as we fight to provide a voice for the industries and communities rendered defenceless in the face of ill-conceived afforestation incentives which are already leading to unemployment, displacement and declining standards of living for those left behind.
The tension between competing land uses has long existed between forestry and pastoral farming; however never before has a government provided the mechanisms for one to obliterate the other to the extent that this potential now exists.
It is this case that we ask your support in defending.
Not that forestry should be maligned, but that the Government of today and Governments going forward must be made to see that crippling small towns through distorted market incentives is morally wrong, economically foolish and will impact vulnerable individuals and communities for generations to come.
It’s not just morally wrong and economically foolish, it’s socially destructive, it’s not backed up by science and will do more harm than good to the environment.
The government ignored advice from Environment Commissioner Simon Upton who said the science shows trees could off-set methane emissions but would not offset fossil fuel emissions.
If New Zealand produces less food, it will be replaced by meat and milk from other countries whose farmers are far less efficient than ours.
We have already picked up the torch of environmental restoration and we willingly carry it as the legacy we leave for those who come after us; in this we are already united, but a crippled community can restore nothing, and an empty community will not care.
We ask you to join your name to our petition and stand alongside us as we defend our common right to live and work on the land, growing food for our country sustainably, ethically and for the benefit of all New Zealand.
Some areas should never have been cleared and should be replanted in trees.
But there is no economic, environmental or scientific justification for turning productive farmland into forests.