Productive land needs protection

We’ve grown lazy and complacent. Fattened on the plenty provided by rich lands, we are now increasingly turning our backs on them. So separated have we become from the production of the food that passes over our plates; so inexorable has the shift been in human resources and amenities from the heartland to the high street, that the Government has seen a need to step in and protect the fertile soils that have long fed it all.

That complacency is built on something of a lie. Most of us live in cities and other centres of urban sprawl. But the images that we employ to sell our country to others, and the dream to ourselves, are those of bucolic rural spread, mile upon mile of rolling river, meadow and gentle hill, all leading to majestic mountain ranges.

The reality is somewhat different.

A contrasting image is one of a tightening noose of land supply for housing, abetting a crisis, but it is our primary production sector that faces the greater challenge, with just 14 per cent of the country classified as highly productive.

Horticulture NZ puts that figure at less than 5 per cent.

That pinch point is felt most keenly in and around Auckland where, Environment Minister David Parker says, more than 200 produce growers have pulled up roots in the face of residential rezoning.

But that pressure is felt elsewhere as well, from the many market gardens chewed up and spat out by urban drift in Wellington, to the best sheep and beef country converted to forestry in Hawke’s Bay, Wairarapa, Tararua and Manawatu¯ , and tensions over land use by fruit and vegetable growers in the rich Canterbury Plains.

That is why the Government’s draft National Policy Statement on Highly Productive Land is such an important document.

It would direct local bodies to do a better job of using the Resource Management Act to not only identify its most fertile land but also take steps to protect it from the clutches of urban development.

That creates a new tension for local bodies, some of which might be struggling to house a growing population within the current regulatory framework and the land at their disposal.

But it is important that we get this right. For New Zealand and many other consumers around the world.

Tourism may be the flavour of the month but it is largely the rolling meadows and mountain ranges those visitors have paid to see, the same fertile lands that also supported primary production industries worth $35.4 billion in exports in 2016.

Eighty per cent of the veges grown on that land fed Kiwis, with much of its fruit, wine and practically all of its milk feeding and refuelling hundreds of millions of people around the world.

If we lose more of that land, if we continue to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, we lose not only the capacity to feed ourselves and control an important aspect of our own destiny, we also lose a part of ourselves, an attachment to the land that has raised us, shaped us and, in many ways, defines us.

If we lose more of that land . . . we lose the capacity to feed ourselves.