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The Green Party wants farmers to ditch harmful fertilizers, improve water quality and become adequately sustainable, and it would like the government’s own farms to lead the way.
The party is also interested in strengthening animal welfare rules, including a ban on the export of livestock and improving sustainability by banning Palm Kernel Expeller (PKE) imports.
The Party announced its agricultural policy on Saturday, which focused on helping farms make the transition to a more sustainable way of doing business, known as regenerative agriculture.
He wants Pamū Farms of New Zealand (Landcorp) to lead the way by switching to regenerative agriculture.
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However, the main focus of the policy is private farms.
Ecological co-leader James Shaw said New Zealanders had a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform the way we grow and produce food and fiber.”
He said the party wanted to help farms decarbonize, which will be essential to meet New Zealand’s climate change commitments.
“The reality is that the way we farm today is accelerating climate change.
“For decades successive governments have focused exclusively on profit, treating farms like factories.
“They have ignored the status of the earth as a precious ecosystem unto itself,” Shaw said.
To fix that, the party announced a $ 297 million fund to help farmers go green.
The party’s “agriculture for the future” policy would take the current Sustainable Food and Fiber Futures Fund and turn it into what the Greens call a Healthy Food and Agriculture Fund.
That fund currently has an annual budget of $ 40 million a year. The Greens want to increase it to $ 297 million over the next three years, paid in part by a tax on the sale of nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers.
Ricky Wilson / Stuff
James Shaw and Marama Davidson want to green New Zealand agriculture.
The party says the fund would allow farmers, recruitment groups and agricultural organizations to implement $ 145 million in “organic and regenerative farming methods.” These would include things like “diversification of pastures and cover crops, multiple crop rotations and reduced tillage.”
Regenerative agriculture research would get $ 5 million, Maori farming organizations would get $ 40 million, and $ 50 million would go to projects that move our cattle-dense agriculture sector towards plant-based vegan practices.
The party says that moving towards sustainable agriculture would mean that “part of the existing capacity of dairy factories and slaughterhouses will have to be replaced by processing infrastructure for plant-based foods.”
The party estimates that your tax will cost about $ 1,515 for the average dairy farm, $ 1205 for the average sheep and beef farm, and $ 484 for the average outdoor vegetable growing farm.
Shaw said that when combined with funding for river cleanup announced by the current government, the Greens’ policy would mean there would be a billion dollars of support for cleaner agriculture.
The party also wants to strengthen animal welfare rules. Industrial agriculture and farrowing cages would be phased out and the export of live cattle for breeding would be prohibited.
Animal welfare would also be reinforced by the creation of a Minister or Associate Minister for Animal Welfare.
Greenpeace called the changes “transformative.”
“Synthetic fertilizers and imported feed like PKE, fuel-intensive dairy production, which is polluting our climate, degrading rivers and polluting drinking water,” said Greenpeace agricultural activist Gen Toop.
“Wildfires are burning around the world and our rivers and lakes have been pushed to the brink.
“This is not the time for half measures. Ending the use of PKE is exactly the kind of bold and transformative policy needed to tackle the climate and freshwater crisis, ”he said.
New Zealand is the world’s largest importer of PKE. Dairy cows are fed when the livestock load is too high for the pasture to support them, but the feeding is also linked to deforestation and human rights abuses, drawing the ire of groups like Greenpeace.
The Greens also want to strengthen the labeling rules for organic products.
Jenny Lux, a spokeswoman for the Soil & Health Association, said she was encouraged by the Greens’ support for organic farming.
“We would like to see all political parties exploring the opportunities that regenerative organic agriculture offers in terms of environmental protection, healthy food and resilient communities,” he said.
“We believe that the Green Party’s policy of creating sustainable food certification in New Zealand could finally help us fulfill our ‘100% pure’ aspiration as a nation.
“However, a national accreditation would only work if it was based on the measurement of results and met the standards for regenerative organic agriculture already recognized around the world,” he said.
