Land for Food or Houses

This column was first published in the Franklin County News on 5th December 2017.

There will be many among our community who will remember, vividly, the Auckland Super City proposal debate. It got pretty rough at times. There was the incident where the then Auckland City Mayor, John Banks, mistakenly sent a text to the Mayor of North Shore, Andrew Williams, calling him a lunatic. The Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey tried to be a peace maker and was accused of “elitist bullshit” by the Auckland Regional Council Mike Lee.

Rodney Hide was the Government Minister promoting one council, one mayor with 20-30 Local Boards for the greater Auckland region.

Our then District Council led by Mayor Mark Ball organised a number of public meetings asking me to chair some of them. The most notable for me was the packed Pukekohe Town Hall meeting. It was packed and after the various speakers had finished their pieces the floor was open and there was no shortage of folk wanting to say their piece, and pretty determined they were too.

A major source of contention was that it was a land grab to build houses for the burgeoning Auckland population and Franklin was one of the biggest areas of A class growing soils in the country.

The debate on land use has arisen again as those houses are being built on what were once productive market gardens and farms. At the same time we got a sharp reminder how vulnerable the food supply is when a very wet winter made both growing and harvesting difficult and some vegetable supplies reduced.

Since 2001 NZ has lost 6,000ha of vegetable growing land. There is a misconception that we export most of our horticultural produce. Certainly we export a lot of our fruit produce but only 4% of our vegetables exported, most of it is for domestic supply. Pukekohe is one of the main growing areas for feeding NZ vegetables, especially in the spring.

Reduce the supply and it’s pretty obvious, the price goes up and maybe we even end up relying on imports for our vegetables.

European settlement of NZ usually developed around areas where the settlers could farm, firstly to feed themselves and then maybe sell surplus produce. As those areas grew in population we saw the development of service towns to include people who made their living from supporting the surrounding farming community. And that is when the dilemma began as the ‘urban’ population grew.

We are more city based than ever. With a rapidly expanding world population tipped to rise a staggering 24% from 7.5 billion today to about 9.8 billion by 2050, the world’s farmers will need to produce at least 60% more food than they currently do, if all the mouths are to be fed adequately.

According to the World Bank, if you invest in agriculture, you are two to three times more likely to have a positive impact on poverty reduction, livelihoods, and food security, than in any other sectors.

There is no doubt we need homes, there is a desperate shortage in Auckland. And that need has brought home to us the need also for a food security policy with a nationwide vision for how we feed ourselves.