Homesteaders from Ho‘olehua compete for District 13 seat
Incumbent state Rep. Lynn DeCoite faces challenge from Walter Ritte
EDITOR’S NOTE:
The Maui News will be featuring the profiles and platforms of candidates in the lead up to the Aug. 8 primary election. Today’s story focuses on the race for the House District 13 seat. Stories on other races will be published in the coming days, with a special primary issue to be released July 25.
A sweet potato farmer who’s unapologetically supportive of all kinds of farming and a high-profile activist who’s vigorously opposed to pesticides and GMOs are out to prove they can cater to both sides of the aisle.
Rep. Lynn DeCoite, the only farmer and rancher in the state Legislature, is defending her seat against fellow Ho‘olehua homesteader Walter Ritte, who rose to prominence while fighting to stop the bombing of Kahoolawe in the 1970s.
Both are deeply interested in the future of agriculture, especially in their district of East Maui, Molokai and Lanai, where residents have gained a reputation for self sustainability, from the homestead farms of Ho‘olehua to the lo‘i kalo of Keanae.
By Aug. 8, voters will decide whose vision they’d most like to guide their district. The winner of the Democratic primary will face Republican Robin Vanderpool and Aloha Aina candidate Theresa Kapaku in the Nov. 3 general election.
LYNN DECOITE
If Lynn DeCoite had her way, she’d turn the moat around the State Capitol into a garden, divide it amongst the 76 lawmakers and have everyone grow their own crops just to see “how hard it is.”
“Just so they can experience and walk in the saddle of those farmers and ranchers that work 24/7 to put food on their tables,” DeCoite said. “Everybody wants to tell you how to farm, and they can’t do it themselves.”
The third-generation homestead farmer grew up pulling sweet potatoes out of the same land her grandmother planted them in. She and her husband Russell founded L&R Farms, which produced about 15,000 pounds of sweet potatoes a week prior to the pandemic — now down to about 10,000 pounds — on roughly 400 acres of state-leased land.
So it’s no surprise that she feels farming and food security are at the heart of Hawaii’s needs, a reality that became abundantly clear when the pandemic hit and the shelves were wiped clean.
“The priority is to be taking care of the food supply, which is agriculture,” she said. “Just being one farmer, watching COVID-19 occur, nothing else mattered at this point but that people have food.”
For DeCoite, that means supporting all farmers — conventional and organic — in her legislation.
“The whole issue here is giving you one choice of what you want to eat,” DeCoite said. “In this time of COVID-19, whether you had organic, conventional, it didn’t matter. People were hungry, they were taking it.”
If reelected, DeCoite said she would use the pandemic to drive home the point of food security. Hawaii can’t expect to expand its food production while allocating less than 1 percent of its budget to the Department of Agriculture.
DeCoite said the state needs to keep better data on things such as which crops can be grown in which district and how much water it takes, to better encourage growth in the right areas. It needs to tap into the expertise of existing farmers to train new ones. And, it needs to be more careful about where it invests its money.
“There’s a lot of people that write great plans, but the execution is a zero, one ‘F,’ which is why the bulk of them fail,” she said. “The ones that do fail, it’s because they’re repetitive in coming in for grants.”
During her time at the Legislature, DeCoite said she’s has sponsored bills to ease the burden of getting certified under the federal Food Safety Modernization Act and to offer grants for farmers to do so, provided they had already invested money towards it. (DeCoite said she hasn’t applied herself to avoid the
appearance of a conflict of interest by getting funding from her own legislation.)
She uses her home island of Molokai as an example of how to boost and diversify the economy by taking stock of “what surrounds you.” On Molokai, axis deer have overrun the island and destroyed crops, but people have capitalized on it, hunting deer for venison and jerky and in turn reducing the population — value-added products plus environmental benefit.
DeCoite wants to work with the state Department of Land and Natural Resources to allow access to state lands to hunt deer, instead of people having to go on private property.
“We’ve always encouraged entrepreneurship on Molokai,” she said. “But some state rules and regulations have made it really hard.”
The pandemic has also made clear the need for a better tourism management system, particularly in her district of East Maui. After Hana Highway shut down and visitors disappeared, residents saw a chance to reshape the future of the industry in their community. When asked what she thought an effective management plan would look like, DeCoite said she’d rather hear from the community first.
“I don’t like encroaching on somebody’s district . . . without hearing their plan first,” she said. “It should be reflective of what the people want first, then we can help them tweak it and accommodate it with funds . . . as well as giving them ideas.”
In the last two primary elections, DeCoite beat both opponents by nearly 20 percentage points. Going up against the name recognition of Ritte will be a new kind of test. Ritte announced his candidacy by saying “the time of status quo is over” and that he wanted to return “aloha aina to the center of decision-making.”
DeCoite said she doesn’t know “why I’m considered status quo.” She pointed out that she introduced a bill in 2016 to study the effects of sunscreen on coral reefs. She fought against the controversial water bill to extend revocable permits for diverting water from East Maui, and brought state officials to Wailuanui to walk the streams and see the dry taro beds.
She responded to criticism of her ties to Monsanto, saying she once grew seed corn for them in the past but no longer does. She said none of L&R Farms’ crops — sweet potato, avocado, taro or squash — are GMOs.
“I think what people should do is they should read versus listen to what others have said, because there’s just so many things out there that have been misconstrued,” DeCoite said. “I believe I’m a person that listens to both sides and it’s never been about personal interest for me.”
“I have been constantly working and will continue and that is my status quo.”
WALTER RITTE
Walter Ritte is known for fighting the system.
He spent 35 days dodging the military across Kahoolawe to stop the bombing of the island. He risked arrest to trespass Molokai’s north shore in a dispute over access rights. And last summer he was one of the 37 kupuna taken into custody at Mauna Kea after he chained himself to a cattle guard in protest of the Thirty Meter Telescope.
Now, however, he’s looking to make waves from the inside.
“Working outside the system is like going to school,” Ritte said. “You really get to know what the grassroots people are saying and what the problems are at the grassroots level . . . . I feel I have a really good idea about some of the things I want to accomplish, and I think that going inside the system and taking all of the things that I’ve learned outside the system is the fastest way to get things accomplished.”
Ritte’s long involvement in public affairs and run-ins with the law have earned him both admiration and frustration — “I have some really good friends and some really good enemies,” he said — but he believes he’s capable of coming to compromise with other lawmakers.
Like DeCoite, Ritte believes that “the pandemic has shown that agriculture should be No. 1.” He said he supports farming but “if you’re not growing food, I cannot support it.” Hawaii doesn’t have enough land to be raising anything other than food, he said, which is why he’s even hesitant to back the cultivation of hemp.
When he was in high school, Ritte was part of the Future Farmers of America club and recalled them growing own eggs, milking cows and raising gardens to help feed the school. The program later disappeared, but Ritte believes that type of education is key to building a new generation of farmers skilled in natural farming practices.
Ritte has campaigned heavily against GMOs and the biotech industry. He said he’s “absolutely against farming with chemicals,” pointing out that the Hawaiians never had to use them and that decades of farming with them have been detrimental to the land.
When asked if he as a lawmaker would withhold funding or programs from farmers who use pesticides, Ritte said that “I would support them, and at the same time have a goal to figure out how we can cut the use.”
“We need small farmers, and if they’re producing food, then they’ve got to produce food the best way they know now, and we’ve got to make sure the educational system teaches the next generation of farmers how to do organics,” he said.
“I wouldn’t go against the food-producing small farmers that are operating now. That doesn’t make sense. That’s going to be a long-term solution. But for the large corporations, there’s no long-term solution. They need to get out now.” When asked if that meant Mahi Pono, Ritte said he’s “not quite sure yet” about the company.
“I guess the word would be ‘suspect,’ ” he said. “They have to prove something.”
For Ritte, the long-term economic solution for Hawaii in the wake of COVID-19 lies in reversing the damage done by an economy based on “extraction jobs” that took from the environment. He wants to create a “conservation corps” to restore what was taken from the land, through jobs like restocking fishponds, removing invasive species and building hatcheries for freshwater shrimp and fish.
“The pandemic has created an atmosphere and a timeout where people can actually think seriously about these ideas, whereas in the past, we was just going so fast nobody had time for new ideas,” he said.
Ritte said the conservation corps could start small, perhaps through a nonprofit, and then expand with the help of other nonprofits and government agencies.
“I don’t think the conservation corps is going to be the solution, but it’s a quick solution, and it has the capability of growing really large,” he said.
As a resident of an island whose largest landowner has long been a Singapore-based firm, Ritte is wary of foreign corporations. However, he expressed interest in bringing investors to Hawaii — perhaps environmental groups in the private sector — who “believe in the triple bottom line” of people, profit and planet.
When asked how he would make the transition to lawmaker and work with his colleagues on bills if elected, Ritte said he has plenty of organizing experience and that the Legislature isn’t much different.
“I’m not going in there with my eyes closed,” he said. “I know how to organize. There’s some things you have to compromise and some things you don’t compromise. It’s based on integrity, it’s based on relationships, and I’m eager to establish those things when I go in.”