Estimates Debate — In Committee - Vote Agriculture and Forestry

Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green) : I am glad that the Minister in the chair, the Hon Jim Anderton, referred to the Sustainable Farming Fund, because two kinds of transformation are under way in agriculture in New Zealand that are quite unsustainable at the moment, and this Government is not really addressing them.

The first transformation is the undermining of the New Zealand - owned producer cooperative Fonterra. As a result of restructuring, we are now starting to see the beginnings of the unravelling of the New Zealand ownership of the dairy industry. That is an incredibly important industry, and I totally agree with the comments made earlier by Doug Woolerton on this issue. It is a really dramatic development when we see Fonterra being undermined by foreign ownership, and we are seeing that from all over the show. The biggest part of the current account deficit, we should remember, involves transfers overseas to pay off debt, and transferring profits to overseas-owned corporations.

The second great transformation that is under way in agriculture in this country is the rise of large-scale industrial intensive dairying. That is a wholly new kind of ball game. We have not seen dairying as intensive as this or on this kind of scale before in New Zealand. It is seldom recognised that a kind of revolution is under way and is happening right across the country, from the top of the country to the bottom. As I travel around this country, I visit farms right across it that are being transformed. We are seeing much higher inputs of water—water is being added on an immense scale—and much greater inputs of external feeds than previously. Our imports of palm kernel, for example, have increased dramatically, by about a thousand-fold in the last 8 years, and they are being fed to animals in the dairy sector. Our inputs of fertiliser have increased dramatically over that time. Electricity is being used to run the giant pivot irrigators, which anyone who has been to the Canterbury Plains will be extremely familiar with. That means the amount of electricity being used has increased dramatically as well. We have seen an intensification and a kind of industrialisation of primary production.

On the one hand people might say the intensification makes dairying more productive—and that is, of course, true. But it also increases its environmental impact dramatically. We are seeing that particularly with regard to our waterways. Right across the country our waterways are in deep trouble. They are in trouble from two things. On the one hand there is the issue of abstraction. There is much, much greater abstraction of water for irrigation than occurred previously, and we are seeing the drying up of some of our major rivers, particularly in the Canterbury Plains but elsewhere as well—and now in Southland. The other great contributor is, of course, the runoff or the pollution. That is both runoff that goes across the surface and straight into the waterways, and also runoff that goes through our groundwater—the fertiliser that is leaching through to our groundwater, as well as the urine and faeces from cows that ends up in our waterways. Right across the country we are seeing a decline in the quality of our rivers and lakes as a result of the intensification and industrialisation of agriculture.

If we close our eyes to that decline in water quality, then we are undermining one of the single most important economic assets we have: the “clean, green” brand of New Zealand. “100% Pure New Zealand” is the basis on which we have built our two biggest export industries: tourism and primary production. “100% Pure New Zealand” and the “clean, green” brand are fundamental to the economic future of this country. That branding and that reality are being undermined by what is happening as a result of the out-of-control intensification of agriculture right now, from the top to the bottom of this country.

We have called on the Government many times to intervene to slow down that process. We need to impose a moratorium on the issue of new consents to discharge to water, particularly in at-risk catchments. Regional councils right across the country know the at-risk catchments; we all know lots of them. We need to have a moratorium in order to create some breathing space so that we can address the problem. We need to have a moratorium on new water consents not only to discharge to water but also to take water—abstraction consents. Those two things together would create a bit of breathing space. Beyond that, we need to have a much more effective national environmental standard and a national policy statement. Obviously we are pleased that the Government has finally announced the national policy statement on water. It took quite a long time—an extremely long time—and—

Dail Jones: I hope it wasn’t watered down!

Dr RUSSEL NORMAN: —it was a bit watered down, but none the less we are glad that it appeared. But the national policy statement is still incredibly weak; it needs to be much stronger than it is. And the process is too slow. My guess is that it could take anywhere from 10 years to, maybe, 12 years before district plans are actually changed as a result of that national policy statement, once all the different steps involved have been gone through—that is, getting the national policy statement through, and all the rest of it.

We need to take urgent action on cleaning up our water.