Rural communities face serious issues from poor livestock profitability, and land use changes resulting from the ETS.
The Government and forestry companies have stated they want to increase the forestry area by 2 million hectares.
This could take out 1,500 farms, and severely dent livestock and rural populations in many areas of the country.
The East Coast region is one such area at risk, as this Gisborne Herald article illustrates, and very little discussion has been had on the implications of such a major land use change.
High noon is just around the corner for the district’s farming sector and unless there are some dramatic changes soon, there will be serious impacts for the city and the tourism industry here, Federated Farmers Gisborne-Wairoa president Hamish Cave warned the council’s community development committee yesterday.
There was an urgent need to improve profitability or there would be a massive shift away from pastoral farming, brought about by rising costs, fluctuating commodity prices and high exchange rates, and there were now many farmers who could not afford to stay in the industry.Agriculture made up 15 percent of New Zealand’s Gross Domestic Product but farmers were getting only 6.2 cents from each dollar earned.
The average farm income here was now only $23,000 a year and with that farmers had to pay debt, reinvest in their farms and feed their family. Many were becoming financially unsustainable, with large proportions of this income going to the banks and to Gisborne District Council for rates.
The Government had already indicated that it wanted another one million hectares planted for carbon credits. Forestry companies also wanted to plant another million hectares, which meant two million hectares would be taken out of the agricultural sector. If each average farm had three children going to school, that would lead to an awful lot of school closures and further depopulation of the East Coast and rural communities.
3 Comments
What would 500ooo hectares of mature Rimu, Matai, Totara, Tawa and Kauri be worth today?
And isn't that your point simbit? We can go on living in the past, whether is was right or wrong, for only so long. It won't matter who did what to whom if we are broke; tenants in our own country, or worse, exiles from it. We live in a present of delusion, and need to move into a realistic future..
Top post AndrewJ and right on the button IMHO
Be a great shame though for our country side to become (more of) an agribusiness food factory, even more so to have it owned by investors that don't live on farm, rarely if ever visit and have no interest in it besides the bottom line.
I know many farmers with a genuine love for and pride in their properties. They make a huge effort to ensure the streams are clean, animals are healthy and happy and spend time and money planting up so that it looks attractive as well. I suspect that some of the offensive comments (a country that is nothing but one big reeking dairy farm, with rivers of cow shit and nary a tree to be seen is so much more attractive and compelling as far as tourists are concerned) are from people with little or no contact with the countryside and it's people.
In the bigger picture, what we are seeing is Marx's "crisis of capitalism"; the ongoing destruction of profitability by the competitive process. This requires ever more mechanisation, less labour, larger farms, less capacity to protect the environment or enhance aethsetic qualities. The return on investment plunges, forcing the prospective farmer to seek fresh fields as you have. Eventually any remotely cultivateable land is converted to the most austere rural food factory.
Unfortunately, we are very reliant on our rural sector so this is all not good news and, absent any worthwhile productive output from our useless cities, dooms us to a diminishing standard of living.
Perhaps, all things considered, the NZ family farm or even the French model is a more attractive prospect.
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