Labour shifts goalposts on forestry goal, its first policy of 2020 campaign

Labour has quietly shifted the goalposts on its first campaign promise of the 2020 campaign, a policy that would make it more difficult to plant swathes of prime food-producing land in trees to harvest carbon credits.

Last July, Labour's rural communities spokesman Kieran McAnulty and Forestry spokesman Stuart Nash promised that within six months of the next Government being formed, Labour would amend National Environmental Standards for Plantation Forestry to allow councils to determine for themselves what classes of land can be used for plantation and carbon forests.

Resource consent would have been required for plantation forests to be grown on land known as "elite soils", land which has a Land Use Capability Class of 1-5. Land of a higher ranking, deemed less essential for food production, could still be used for forestry as now.

The policy responded to fears from some rural communities that the high price of carbon under the emissions trading scheme was encouraging swathes of the countryside to be planted in pine trees. As the price of carbon rose, it became more economical to convert productive farmland to pine forests.

That original policy has been canned, as has the six-month deadline, which expired two months ago.

However both Nash and McAnulty said the Government will still enact policy to get the right trees planted in the right parts of rural New Zealand. The Government is delaying the work while it worked up a response to the Climate Change Commission's advice on how to meet the country's emissions reduction commitments.

The Government's response will have an impact on demand for trees to sequester carbon.

Nash said the task of changing land use rules for forestry was bigger than he first anticipated.

"You scratch the surface and actually we understand that there's a little bit more work to do than I had initially planned," Nash said.

"We felt it would be prudent to wrap the work we're doing in forestry into all the other work that's going on with regard to addressing climate change action."

Nash said he was talking to Climate Change Minister James Shaw about what changes "we need to make to actually give it the effect it should have".

The Government is still committed to the idea of "right tree, right place", however.

McAnulty said that in many cases the policy was already running. He said Land Information Minister Damien O'Connor had recently briefed a select committee that he had "no applications for blanket conversion through the Overseas Investment Office on classes 5 and below", meaning that, at least for foreign companies wanting to get into plantation forestry, the policy was already effectively working.

"I'm pleased because the policy in terms of ministerial discretion is applied anyway," McAnulty said.

"It's still going to happen but it's tied into broader work," he said.

The scale of the problem may have been overstated to begin with. The latest data shows that since 1989, 87 per cent of ETS-registered forests were planted on land use classes of 6 and above.