We are completely reliant on New Zealand growers for most of our vegetables. Photo / 123rf
THE FACTS
More likely than not, you buy your broccoli at the supermarket.
Unlike fruit, it doesn’t have a sticker, so there is no way of knowing where it came from.
If the supermarket is following the rules, it should say “Product of New Zealand” or something similar on the sign with the price, but no further details.
That broccoli was probably grown in New Zealand, and probably on the island where you live.
Far more likely than not, it was grown by a family business, sold to a wholesaler, then sold to one of the two big supermarket chains, trucked to a distribution centre in Auckland, Palmerston North or Christchurch, then redistributed in a refrigerated truck back to a supermarket near you.
The odds that the broccoli was imported are as good as zero, and the odds of a broccoli grown in New Zealand being exported are the same as picking a person at random from all of New Zealand and finding out they live in Tauranga.
For broccoli, like most vegetables, we are completely reliant on New Zealand growers.
Fresh vegetables are perishable and don’t travel well.
The geographic isolation that comes with our lovely location in the South Pacific means local farms are the only way we can get enough vegetables to feed our population.
In a country hyper-focused on export growth, it might not be a surprise to learn that most policymakers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about vegetable production.
The $1.44 billion vegetable industry can’t compete with $23.23b of export dairy revenue in a purely economic comparison, and carrots don’t hold the same warm place in the New Zealand collective identity as lambs.
Vegetables, however, are critically important to the nation’s ability to feed itself nutritious, affordable food.
Continued access to vegetables is a resilience issue as well.
With global supply chain shocks as frequent as price increases on supermarket bakery bread, growing food for New Zealanders on our own whenua is as important as ever.
Unfortunately, policy hasn’t always been designed with vegetable growers in mind.
In two of New Zealand’s largest vegetable-growing areas, Horowhenua and Pukekohe, freshwater rules, in my opinion, make it nearly impossible to get a resource consent to grow most vegetables.
That puts more than a quarter of the North Island’s vegetable growing at risk.
The rules also don’t work for crop rotation, a regenerative practice used by all outdoor New Zealand growers and practised for over 1000 years around the world.
It should be acknowledged that vegetable growing is a high-intensity use of the land.
It grows more food on less land than other types of farming – feeding all of New Zealand plus some export of onions, potatoes, squash and frozen vegetables on just over 0.1% of the total land area.
All our vegetable-growing land could fit within the city boundaries of Lower Hutt.
That intensity comes with environmental effects, particularly nitrogen leaching.
Growers are aware of this and are working on reducing these effects as much as possible.
Through Growing Change, a programme run by Horticulture New Zealand and jointly funded with the Ministry for the Environment, growers have been taking up farm environment planning through the NZ Good Agricultural Practices Environment Management System (EMS).
This is independently audited and certified.
The plans include practices to reduce the risks of erosion and nutrient loss to waterways.
All plans are checked regularly by independent auditors to make sure the actions are completed or progressing.
As of July, about three-quarters of all vegetable-growing land is registered with the EMS.
Even with all these good practices, vegetable growing still involves some environmental effects.
That said, it’s a tiny land use that is essential for food supply, which contributes, on average, 4.6% of nitrogen in the freshwater catchments where it’s located.
Knowing that vegetable growing is a relatively small contributor to freshwater degradation and critically important to New Zealanders’ access to healthy kai, it’s a concern that councils have designed frameworks that, in my view, allow farming animal products to continue at scale but require vegetable growing to shrink.
New Zealand’s vegetable-growing area has already shrunk by more than 25% over the past decade.
If unworkable rules restrict supply any further, vegetable prices will go up.
This is while vegetable growers already operate with marginal profits or even at a loss due to the power of the supermarket duopoly, and while, in my view, consumers pay massively marked-up prices at the supermarket.
That’s where national direction for vegetables comes in. Recognising the importance of vegetables for our national food bowl, the Ministry for the Environment has proposed a new objective in our national freshwater policy that directs councils to provide for vegetable production, particularly crop rotation.
The Government is also consulting on national standards for vegetable production, which would mean that each grower has to manage their impact on the environment by, say, writing a nutrient budget to match their fertiliser use to the nutrients required by the crop.
If those standards are met, vegetable growers won’t need to apply for a resource consent, and they’ll have certainty that they can keep growing the healthy food that we all eat.
National direction for vegetables won’t fix the supermarket’s markups on fresh produce or resolve the myriad complex reasons why more than a quarter of New Zealand children are food-insecure.
It will, however, require councils to consider people’s access to vegetables when they make decisions about allocating our scarce resources.
We shouldn’t have to trade off access to healthy food with protecting the environment. It’s a matter of prioritising both domestic food supply and environmental limits, while designing rules that create a level playing field for plant-based production.