Inquiry must prevent slash devastation from happening again

Sam McIvor, Beef + Lamb New Zealand CEO

Opinion

by Sam McIvor, Beef + Lamb New Zealand CEO
It’s been a little over six weeks since the eastern North Island felt the brunt of Cyclone Gabrielle. My heart goes out to everyone affected in those communities.
Beef + Lamb NZ (B+LNZ) staff have witnessed the devastation while working on the ground and as part of crews flying to reach and speak with farmers, and deliver fuel, food and farming essentials.
Earlier this month I visited Hawke’s Bay farmers in Ōtāne, Rissington and Glengarry, before travelling to Tolaga Bay and Ruatōria. I also video-called other isolated Tairāwhiti farmers in Pehiri, Wharekōpae, Hangaroa and Rere.
The scale of damage caused to farms and rural communities by the intense rain and flooding shocked me.
This was made much worse by forestry slash. Some people lost their homes because of slash in the flooding; others I talked to had valuable farming land on the flats covered in heavy silt and forestry slash. One farmer calculated it would cost $150,000 to restore 50 hectares of flats and infrastructure back to production.
Slash has destroyed bridges and countless kilometres of fencing, blocked access to farms in desperate need of help and damaged farm infrastructure that will take farmers years to rebuild.
Almost one-third of New Zealand’s sheep and half of our beef cattle are in the North Island regions that were subject to a state of emergency during cyclones Hale and Gabrielle.
Not only are farmers facing significant costs to reinstate their land and infrastructure, they’ve also lost income and land value. This has an economic and environmental knock-on effect.
On average, farmers and processors support their communities with approximately $100m of farm-related expenditure every week. There’s no doubt these affected farmers will have to rethink their spending priorities which will put some rural service businesses under even more pressure.
This slash issue must force a rethink.  
The government previously provided funding to plant much of this exotic forestry and is now encouraging further wholesale land use change from pastoral-based farming into exotic trees via the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The increasing price of carbon credits is distorting what land is worth. The rate of whole-farm sales and conversions is out of control, gutting rural communities and jeopardising the $12bn income per year our sector generates for New Zealand.
We are seeing new exotic planting occurring across the country without the required forethought of consequences our rivers and communities will face 30 years from now. 
Although the relationship between carbon farming and exotic forestry is nuanced, these activities are now tied. We can’t look at the mismanagement of exotic forests without also looking at the complete lack of management of carbon forests, and the wider ETS settings.
There is concern that this could happen again with the Government’s ETS and foreign investment settings allowing for large areas of food-producing land to be converted into carbon-price-incentivised forestry. Another question is whether the national benefit for foreign forestry investors adequately covers the risk of environmentally unsustainable logging practices.
B+LNZ is not anti-forestry. We know a lot of farmers are looking to integrate trees within farms — exotic and native — and that’s a good thing.
But this Government has a habit of rushing through environment regulations without thinking of how best to achieve the desired outcomes for the environment, or about other long-term impacts. We’ve ended up with a lot of poorly crafted and conflicting rules that have significant negative financial implications for farmers, rural communities, and the wider economy.
One of the biggest issues they’ve created is the urgent need for limits on the number of forestry offsets available in the ETS to fossil-fuel emitters, in line with what happens in other countries.
Last month’s announcement of a ministerial inquiry must lead to concrete actions so that the scale of devastation does not happen again.