Sam McIvor joins Angus Kebbell to discuss the consequences of rapid-fire poor policy-making, how it is building unintended consequences, and leaving a trail of regulatory mess that is going to take years to fix

This week on Factum-Agri, Sam McIvor, the chief executive of Beef+Lamb NZ, discusses some of the current challenges facing the farming community.

Policy change is an area that is seemingly endless for farmers. As a food producing nation that relies on export revenue and of course food security is important not only here in New Zealand but globally, I can’t help but think policy makers should be reducing unworkable and cumbersome policy to help and enable our farmers.

The ETS and afforestation are policy areas that are causing concern. Why does the Government allow emitters to offset 100% of their pollution through the ETS, and indeed support the expansion of lock-up-and-walk-away carbon forests?

McIvor: “Well, I can’t answer to why the government continues to do that because on every front it doesn't make sense."

"Firstly we know that we need to absolutely reduce our carbon emissions as a nation and in terms of our footprint, so allowing carbon emitters to offset 100% of their emissions is a real disincentive for them to make the hard calls about taking carbon out of the system."

"The second thing is this; you've made the point that we are a food producing nation and so let's look at the contrast here of a carbon farm versus a food producing sheep and beef farm. So what does that do to [sheep and beef]? It utilises the environment in the best way possible in terms of those resources. Secondly, it provides employment and a contribution to a rural community. Thirdly, what it does is it produces export revenue for New Zealand, we are the most export revenue exposed nation in the world so driving export revenue is really important. The red meat sector supports close to 100,000 jobs, it puts about $3,000 into every household in New Zealand every year and so what the government is doing here is cutting off our nose to spite our face."

"We know that at some point in the future that carbon price is going to return to zero and so what do we have at that point is that we have a bunch of those landowners with carbon farms that shut those gates and walk away, what does our countryside look like?"

"What does the future of our economy look like? It is just dumb stuff frankly, every other government around the world has worked it out except for our one, no other government allows 100% offsetting of their emissions. And in fact you go to somewhere like California I think it's a maximum of sort of 9% So we're just we're just miles off where we should be on this one and so for us, if we look at He Waka Eke Noa and the industry is commitment to that we're absolutely saying that before payments come in for emissions in 2025 the government absolutely has to sort out this offsetting because what we're seeing is that sheep and beef farmers and the sector have been hit on two sides. Subsidised purchase of sheep and beef farms and taking out feed production while at the same time, farmers having extra obligations and costs put on them, and they're not being fully recognized for what they're doing on farm so everybody else gets recognition but not the farmers.”

Another significant challenge for farmers is that there's no time for one policy change to embed itself and allow farmers to practically get on with the job sensibly. The current Government keeps lining up the next policy, and the next, rather than enabling our farmers, they are being burdened with unnecessary increased red tape, and McIvor says that's his staff’s challenge on a daily basis.

“One of the ways that we seek to combat that is we work closely with other organisations we work very closely with farmers on policy, and we work very closely with Dairy NZ. We've got the farming Leaders Group where we look at what are those common goals we're trying to achieve, and labour has been one we've come together on and advocated together. So we try to use all of our resources, but it's fair to say that it has been an absolute avalanche of policy and because it's been poorly thought out, you've got to do so much more work on it from an advocacy space."

It's not fine tuning the 10%, you're trying to fine tune 90%."

"So you know my challenge to the government is that you've just got to think about the way that you're doing this and at the end of the day we also know that the government policy people are knackered so they feel overwhelmed by the pressure that they're facing from their ministers."

"And so really for us, we're saying to ministers decide which one or two things are the most important, let's do a cracking good job on that, get it right get it implemented, get it in place and farmers will get on and do the job."

"Well they will continue the job they've already been doing. It’s about enablement not about telling people how they absolutely should do it in a language that nobody can understand, and that we know is impractical."

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Angus Kebbell is the Producer at Tailwind Media. You can contact him here.