How National’s business model is ruining farming

Q+A with Jack Tame's townhall debate at Morrinsville, which aired this morning.

Six parties debated in the dairy capital. Nobody named the thing killing the primary sector.

  Q+A parked itself in Morrinsville today for a town hall debate — National, Labour, ACT, the Greens, New Zealand First and Opportunity, all on one stage in the dairy capital. Provincial New Zealand supposedly had the floor.

  Yet neither the host nor a single candidate named the elephant in the hall: property speculation, and the refusal to protect productive soils, is ruining the primary sector.

  The talking points wrote themselves. Todd McClay spent Fieldays announcing a record $64.3 billion in food and fibre exports. Agriculture, he says at every barbecue, is the backbone of the economy.

  Tell that to the Heretaunga Plains.

  In March, McCain announced it would close its Hastings plant — 50,000 tonnes of vegetables a year, more than 100 growers, $18 million in lost returns. The same month, Heinz Wattie’s confirmed it would close sites in Christchurch, Dunedin and Auckland plus its Hastings frozen lines, stranding 220 Canterbury pea growers.

  Wattie’s had already dropped Hawke’s Bay peach growers. Consumers, it said, prefer imported canned fruit.

  Vegetables New Zealand was blunt: imports of canned and frozen vegetables are killing the local industry — and we cannot rely on imported food to feed us.

  This is what the trade agenda looks like from the receiving end. The agreements National brandishes open doors for milk powder and beef. They also open our supermarket shelves to whatever arrives cheapest in a container.

  Our processors cannot compete, because their costs are rigged against them. Wattie’s boss says gas prices have tripled in seven years; electricity and diesel have doubled. When Hawke’s Bay growers tried to buy the McCain plant, energy cost and reliability was the single biggest barrier to raising capital. Ask the gentailers’ four spokesmen why.

  Rates pile on top. Whangarei farmers copped 30 per cent increases in one year. Carterton floated differentials of up to 1200 per cent on farming and forestry.

  Why do the land values under productive soil — and the rates bills that follow them — keep climbing? Because National keeps feeding the speculation machine.

  Its own press release says the quiet part aloud: the Roads of National Significance will “unlock land for thousands of new houses”. A roading wish-list costed above $50 billion is being marketed as a rezoning play.

  Once a corridor is announced, the land bankers arrive. The market gardener next door is suddenly sitting on “future urban” land, paying rates on a developer’s valuation while earning a grower’s income. The rational move is to sell and grow further from market — until the next corridor catches up.

  In January, the Government stripped Class 3 soils from the Highly Productive Land protections and paused the “Special Agricultural Areas” meant to shield Pukekohe and Horowhenua. Soil scientists called it “an irreversible blunder of intergenerational scale”.

  Fast-track completes the set. I have shown how a luxury lodge was referred on the vaguest of details, and how a golf course was lined up for 1,000 houses. The consents economy rewards whoever owns the dirt, not whoever grows in it.

  At the checkout, the Commerce Commission found the supermarket duopoly wringing billions from suppliers too frightened of delisting to push back — while stocking home brands with the cheap imports that hollowed out the processors.

  See the pattern. Farmers’ costs — energy, rates, land — are inflated by the property economy National protects. Farmers’ returns are undercut by the imports its trade agenda ushers in. And the processors between paddock and plate are picked off one by one — Smithfield, Wattie’s, McCain — taking security of supply with them.

  None of it rated a question in Morrinsville. National soothes farmers with talk of technology and red-tape bonfires, then polarises the vote so they see nowhere else to go. ACT would go harder on them. New Zealand First sells nostalgia as a policy platform.

  That is the business model. Farming is the brand. Property is the product.

When the last market gardener sells to the last land banker, National will still call it growth — and the town hall will still not ask about it.