Coinciding with the United Nations launch in New York, last November, I facilitated the New Zealand launch of 2014 International Year of Family Farming (IYFF) here at Parliament.
That launch by the New Zealand conveners of IYFF brought together representatives from 50 organisations, including rural community and farming groups, such as Rural Women New Zealand, Young Farmers, and Federated Farmers, and also some government staff.
It was therefore satisfying a few weeks ago to attend Rural Women New Zealand’s IYFF event at Rai Valley. It was a good event with strong engagement that included the history of some multi-generational farming families, and speakers that encouraged personal enterprise and new thinking «to stay in the game», through to personal safety and also a resilient systems approach to agriculture. The Rai Valley event was a typical collection of rural New Zealanders coming together as a community acknowledging heritage and family, and mirrored similar events around the world.
Yet, practically, as we enjoyed the day, deals were being stitched up for more of Marlborough and New Zealand’s farming family land to be sold off to absentee overseas owners or large corporations. The IYFF motto Family Farming: Feeding the world, caring for the earth seems the opposite to the direction of farming in New Zealand with increasing overseas and corporate owned farms here. Some new overseas owned operations may make great environmental gains, however, all too many leave a different legacy while driving up the purchase price of land for the next generation of New Zealand farmers.
The never ending selling of our farming, forestry, horticulture and viticulture land – our economic base – to overseas owners is the selling of our children’s future opportunity.
It is understandable on one level when families sell to overseas interests, because invariably that is the best price, but it is an inflated price that is making ownership of productive land by New Zealanders even more difficult.
Most people can remember the Chinese Shanghai Pengxin buying 16 Crafar farms for more than $200 million and more recently also Synlait Farms, taking Shanghai Pengxin ownership and control to about 12,000 hectares of New Zealand land. New foreign investment is broad and late last year the Federated Farmers dairy chairman and his wife sold one of their farms to an offshore Italian food industry family for $25.1m. More recently Norwegian, Indonesian, Australian, Dutch, American, Swedish, Japanese, Swiss, Italian, Argentinian, Liechtenstein, United Kingdom and French interests have all been grabbing.
New Zealanders mostly don’t agree with foreign ownership and while not the most scientific survey, the Fairfax poll accompanying the story of the recent Chinese purchase of a Marlborough vineyard, had a substantive 83.4 per cent of 4327 votes saying «No» to the question, «Should New Zealand be selling farms to foreign investors?»
Increasing land prices are also increasing rural debt significantly, driving intensification and the related environmental, animal welfare and human social costs. Rural suicide is close to 50 per cent higher than in urban centres.
New Zealand’s pastoral-based clean green production reputation is at serious risk of being lost as over-priced land drives more debt and high production targets for mostly commodity level goods. Agricultural debt of $50 billion has more than doubled in the last 10 years to $32b in dairying alone, effectively $20/kg milk solids. This is environmentally and socially unsustainable.
The Reserve Bank deputy bank governor Grant Spencer has been reported saying that dairy sector debt made the sector vulnerable to a decline in commodity prices or any increase in interest rates. Both are now occurring and 94 per cent of debt is with overseas-owned banks who export much of their profits.
Helping the affordability of farms by preventing overseas ownership, and encouraging a move back towards New Zealand rural banking systems, to reduce and retain interest are some of the solutions to help keep New Zealand family farming from sliding further towards a peasant-hood controlled by corporates.
As Rural Women stated, «The goal of the 2014 IYFF is to reposition family farming at the centre of agricultural, environmental and social policy globally – and identify efficient ways to support family farmers.»
Source: Stuff
