If freezing works close, rural towns die. We need a plan to save them – Editorial

Affco Wairoa – the Hawke's Bay town's largest employer. Photo / NZME

Editorial

• Overseas buyers are converting farms to forestry, causing angst in East Coast communities.
• Ninety-five thousand hectares have been bought and converted between 2015 and 2025, impacting traditional industries.
• Forestry’s benefits are limited compared to the past sheep, beef and wool industries’ economic impact.

Get halfway through a handle of beer in any country pub on the East Coast and the topic of conversation inevitably turns to farms being converted to forestry.

Overseas buyers are land-banking, with the carbon credit payoff, and it has changed the shape of traditional sheep and beef country over the past decade.

It’s a source of huge angst for the communities hit by it.

Successive Governments have listened and added conditions to the sales, but still they continue, driven by a global agenda to tackle climate change.

In total, 95,000ha of Kiwi land was bought by foreigners and converted – or is in the process of being converted – between 2015 and 2025, according to Overseas Investment Office records.

Pine trees, which are brilliant at sequestering carbon, are not completely taking over.

If you look at a timeline of Google Earth satellite images from 30 years back until today, Hawke’s Bay’s map shows a pop-up of dark green mould-like spots, rather than a dark green wave as some would have you believe.

Farmland is still in the vast majority, even if, in Tararua communities like Pongaroa, those still left feel like they’re surrounded on all sides.

The forestry industry adds value to our economy. China likes our timber.

But the industry’s ability to generate positive income while the trees actually grow means its benefits pale in comparison to the glory days of our sheep, beef and wool industries.

What made those economic days so powerful and so romanticised in the Kiwi imagination is the equity the industries provided to our society.

Needed a good-paying job? Go to your small town’s local meatworks. Didn’t like the meatworks? Join a shearing gang.

No qualifications were needed and not a lot of transport – just the ability to get up, day in and day out.

When meatworks began to close from the 1980s onwards, the job losses in the regions left gaping holes.

Instead of shearing gangs, actual gangs began to thrive, fed a steady diet of poor and alienated youths who had no easy-money job to walk into to better themselves.

Today, the remaining abattoirs are still a celebrated part of the communities they sit in, but they’re also a source of constant apprehension.

In Takapau or Wairoa, for example – both on the precipice of a changing landscape of pines instead of sheep – the main hope is that they’ll survive another decade.

Ask anyone in Wairoa what would happen if Affco were to pack up and leave.

If the town is struggling now, its hope of pulling residents out of that hole would be completely hobbled without its main employer.

Perhaps it’s time for the Government to think about this in a different way, before it’s too late for the likes of Wairoa.

We need some bold thinking to find a new industry regional New Zealand can latch upon, one that can give those without qualifications a steady income, on a scale that matches that of the meatworks.

One thing is for certain, forestry alone cannot.

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