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.
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