Environment Minister David Parker announced on Sunday new standards to help safeguard some of the country’s most productive land from urban sprawl.

 

In his announcement Parker said that it would prevent the loss of prime horticultural land and protect it from subdivision and development.

 

This will be welcomed by most of us as we all need to be fed and protecting the prime land that allows the growers to do that is imperative. Whilst we need to have housing for all this should not be at the expense of the prime growing land.

 

We can move the housing developments but we can only work with the land that god has given us when it comes to food production. In this regard the National Policy Statement for Highly Productive Land (NPS-HPL) is a great start but unfortunately it is already apparent that this policy statement is, like many other pieces of this Labour government’s work, sadly lacking in practical details that will make it actually workable for the local bodies affected.

 

Under the NPS – HPL councils are required to identify highly productive land and ensure it’s protected for primary production.

 

As is often the case the devil is in the detail and unfortunately like a lot of the current government’s policies, the details in the NPS – HPL are either missing or have not been adequately considered.

 

This NPS is not fit for purpose!

 

Why?

 

While we need to protect the highly productive land for primary food production, we also need to ensure that the land so protected can actually be used for food production. This ability to use the land to produce food requires a systematic approach which includes all of the inputs needed for growing food crops.

 

The NPS attempts to protect the highly productive lands from development and probably will do so, but that will not automatically mean that the land so protected will actually be able to be used for food production.

 

To achieve the desired production outcomes from this NPS the government and Ministries need to develop an enabling framework that promotes an integrated growing system. This means that we need to have a combination of things including but not limited to the following:

 

· Highly Productive Land

· Access to water for irrigation of vegetables and other crops

· Ability to use the land without encroachment from neighbours (i.e. complaints about noise; visual; machinery usage; hours of operation; etc.) also known as reverse sensitivity

· Access to the land for agricultural machinery

· Ability to sustainably use nutrients to tailor best marketable yield. This helps avoid food wastage

· Ability to sustainably use agrichemicals to protect crops

· Access to workforce

· Access to transport infrastructure

· Reasonable sustainable method of calculating land rates on cropping land values not residential sub-divisional land values

 

Failure to ensure that there is a systematic combination of all of these types of requirements for any highly productive land will mean that there is no guarantee that the land so protected will ever actually be used for food production. This therefore results in the NPS – HPL becoming no more than an impediment on private property rights of the landowners.

 

This NPS is a classic example of winning a battle whilst losing the war through failing to pay attention to the overall plan and losing track of the critical details.

 

Let’s be bluntly honest, this NPS – HPL will protect the highly productive land from development (in other words constrain private property rights of landowners), but it will not do anything to ensure production of primary produce without attention to all of the other details as listed above.

 

A stated earlier, the devil is in the detail!