Collaboration not conflict: A farmer’s perspective

14 October 2014

Collaboration not conflict
A farmer’s perspective on consultation

Speech by Dr William Rolleston, Federated Farmers President, to the New Zealand Association of Resource Management, Wellington

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today to provide you with a farmers’ perspective of engagement, collaboration and action.

I aim to present our view of what is happening, what is working and to articulate our frustrations. I will hope to point out the bottlenecks and make some suggestions for the future.

For those of you who attended the conference last year, Bruce Wills, my predecessor, set the scene very well in the global context.

For those of you who were not here let me briefly recap.

The world’s population stands at just over seven billion people and by 2050 that figure will rise to nearly ten billion. Issues of food security are writ large in the minds of governments and populations not lucky enough to have the capacity to feed themselves.

Water availability is a key factor in the food security equation and New Zealand is fortunate to have abundant water and produce enough food to feed at least ten times our population –around 35 million people.

Water is the key resource of the future and that makes us tomorrow’s “Lucky Country”.

Our modern economy stands unique by being so heavily reliant on the primary industries.

This provides us with both opportunity and challenge.

Our opportunity is that we stand on the doorstep of Asia – a region where incomes are rising rapidly.

Millions of people are moving into the middle class, and with that, comes the demand to eat more animal derived protein. This opportunity is expressed in the government’s goal to double the value of our primary exports by 2025.

Here, however, I should inject a caveat.

This goal has never been, in my view, about doubling New Zealand’s production that some have unhelpfully suggested. That takes a linear view of the word “value” when doubling value is more about increasing productivity and moving up the value chain not to mention new high value products.

For sure there will be a component of increased production but the reality is that we are losing productive land. No less than 1.4 million hectares between 2002 and 2012.

Our challenge to double the value of primary exports must sit within the environmental footprint we set ourselves.

Our investment in science has a key role in exploiting these opportunities and in meeting our challenges.

While Federated Farmers has asked for an increase in our science spending, that is a topic for another day. However, I will come back to the role science has to play in optimising engagement, collaboration and action when it comes to resource management.

According to Statistics NZ, farmland made up some 54.8 percent of New Zealand in 2007. This means that farmers, as a group of resource managers are responsible for more than half of New Zealand. In addition our products contribute to about 73 percent of our merchandise export earnings.

These are significant responsibilities for our industry and if we get it right, if councils and government get it right, then we will optimise both our economy and our environment.

Everyone in this room will know that it is challenging to develop rules and strategies, which aim to provide for the sustainable use and development of regional resources.

It means balancing, indeed, often trading off competing interests. The risk is that in the end everyone loses something and everyone comes out feeling like a loser.

Resource Management Act processes and other regulatory regimes raise other challenges.

First they need to strike the right balance between the interests of local people with the interests of the wider community. This is not just a conflict between private property rights and public interest but the decision maker needs to decide what weighting they should give to the opinion of locals as opposed to those from outside an area.

The second challenge is to determine what is fact and what is opinion. Added difficulty comes from trying to determine what is opinion predicated on an assumed set of “facts”.

Be under no illusion that fear drives public outrage and groups use this powerful emotional response as a weapon to achieve regulatory outcomes. If they are lucky or skilled, or both, the “facts” are forgotten as the outrage seeps in societal consciousness as “ethics”.

Regulatory decisions which on the facts are bad for society can become embedded for years.

We in this room all know that experts don’t always agree, and that risk is not absolute.

These are concepts which create suspicion in the eyes of the public. An articulate expert who provides the categorical is always going to have the tactical advantage over the scientist who makes themselves seem unsure by honestly stating a level of uncertainty.

We see this in many public debates from immunisation to fluoridation and genetic modification. We may even see it in the water quality debate. Persuasion is a product of credibility but in the end it is science and the facts which prevail. For issues where science meets public outrage one has to play the long game.

If I can now dip back into my days of medical training - One of the most useful and enduring psychological observations for me was the description of the five stages of loss and grief by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her book “On Death and Dying”. The five stages she described are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.

While the parallels to the matter at hand are only loose – unlike death we have the opportunity to explore alternative outcomes – the direction of travel does in my mind reflect the process we are going through from all sides.

Three years ago, under a new board and with Bruce Wills at the helm, Federated Farmers made a deliberate decision to move past denial and anger.

We acknowledged that agriculture has an environmental impact and that the way forward was to look for opportunities which would take the environmental lobby and farmers in the same direction.

That is not to belittle the understanding and constructive efforts made by our predecessors but we had reached a point of tension and litigation that was unsustainable on all sides and not in the best interests of our country.

Federated Farmers started to talk about the environment and our challenge to the conservation groups has been for them to start talking about the economy – beyond the closed doors of the Land and Water Forum that is.

That said the Land and Water Forum has been a positive development and a well-recognised example of collaboration – the equivalent of Kübler-Ross’ Bargaining.

Engagement and collaboration don’t just happen. They take considerable time and effort. Often engagement requires just the right set of factors. People need to see the issue, they need to understand that it affects them and they need to see that the effort is going to be worthwhile in the end.

In my view, the Land and Water Forum was born out of the futility of the adversarial approach. The building and operation of the Opuha Dam in South Canterbury also provided a real world example that water storage could provide positive outcomes for the economy, for society and for the environment equally.

The Canterbury Water Management Strategy has further shown that with the right leadership it is possible to collaborate while aspiring to multiple and seemingly conflicting targets.

The idea is to create an outcome which is taking everyone in the same direction. The power of collaboration is such that all sides generally come to realise that they agree on many points, if not, a majority of points.

This builds mutual trust and openness enabling what remains to be resolved.

Parties do not get everything they set out for, but with good and strong leadership, backed by science and creative thinking, the outcomes can be positive for all.

The unreasonable risk isolation and being left behind.

Federated Farmers is genuinely looking for opportunities which have this sort of outcome.

For example, our position on climate change recognises that the overwhelming scientific consensus is that climate change is happening and that human activity, including agriculture, makes a significant contribution.

We also recognise that New Zealand farmers are among the most carbon efficient protein producers in the world and it makes no sense to penalise them for being so productive. Rather we should be encouraging them to continue to increase both productivity and production within other environmental constraints.

Using research and development to increase our productivity as well as carbon efficiency is a win for the economy, a win for the environment and a win for wider world food security while playing our part in climate change mitigation.

Creating along the way science solutions which, we hope, will be applicable to other production systems.

It is to Canterbury water that I now turn to provide you a view from the farmer up so to speak.

The regulatory interpretation of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy has been the Canterbury Land and Water Plan. A default plan, setting limits for water quality with the ability for local catchment communities, through ten appointed zone committees, to decide what attributes and aspirations are appropriate for them.

Our local zone committee has had good leadership, strong local representation, a willingness to listen and patience.

Farmers have quickly moved from anger and confrontation to recognising the issues and a real willingness to take ownership of them for positive outcomes. There is recognition that a collective and collaborative approach will create the possible.

But before I go on let me make some points about Overseer.

The use of Overseer as a regulatory tool continues to be contentious.

Overseer is a strategic tool to assist farm management decisions. It essentially allows farmers to rank options and interventions specific to their situation but it is not designed to provide absolute numbers.

Regulators have been enthusiastic to use Overseer to enable them to regulate based on outputs rather than imposing input restrictions.

Farmers understand the benefits and equity on an output based approach, so have been keen not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

However, if Overseer is to be used to guide regulatory decisions it needs to be accurate, its limitations need to be recognised and it needs to be used in the right way.

We are keen to see Overseer become more reactive and fine-tuned to different situations and farm systems. We are keen to see Overseer used to inform solutions rather than simply provide numbers against which hard rules are made. In short Overseer needs a significant upgrade and Federated Farmers has called for more investment in this area.

That notwithstanding, farmers in my area have worked within the nitrogen allocations to come up with a scheme which they saw as equitable. They rejected grandparenting of nutrients which is the allocation of a property right related to their current emissions.

They also rejected equal allocation per hectare.

Grandfathering risks rewarding those who have been profligate in their nitrogen use while penalising those who have been conservative for whatever reason.

Equal allocation risks a windfall for those who have done nothing while penalizing those who have invested with reasonable expectation. There is good and bad at both ends of the emissions scale.

The solution reached by those of us in South Canterbury provided for flexibility of land use for low emitters – essentially dryland sheep and beef farmers – with realistic targets for reduced emissions for high emitters- for example those who have converted to irrigation and dairy.

The key though is to have all farmers working to best practice and a sinking lid on maximum emissions as best practice improves nitrogen retention. Depending on the state of the catchment, nitrogen freed up from the sinking lid would then be allocated to the flexibility cap or to the environment.

This will draw everyone toward a modified equal allocation over time.

Continued environmental monitoring is critical and the system should be flexible enough to change as more information flows. Indeed for some areas, where there is uncertainty around allocation, a programme of monitoring is being undertaken before final allocations are made.

Water augmentation of environmental flows through the proposed and consented Hunter Downs project will enhance the outcomes for both the environment and for nutrient management and water allocation. Therefore it is not only in the interests of irrigators that Hunter-Downs goes ahead but also for the dryland farmers who will gain more flexibility of land use even without the water irrigating their farms.

Federated Farmers has worked hard over the last four years to bring the primary industry together – at catchment level as I have just described in our part of South Canterbury, at provincial level in Canterbury and at national level - to come up with solutions which maximise our environmental and economic potential. The outcome is similar across all levels and provides a framework while recognising each catchment has its own attributes and challenges.

In some catchments a reduced stocking rate may be the best answer but even in these areas other alternatives exist, such as standoff pads or herd homes, and new novel solutions will become feasible in the future.

Has our local process been perfect? No of course not. In my view there has been a myopic focus on nitrogen limits without really considering the in-stream attributes we are really trying to achieve.

But we have achieved two goals which I consider to be a principle test:

That is any solution must not undermine the business value of the high emitters and secondly it must not undermine the land value of the low emitters.

The outcome in South Canterbury has been one devised by farmers who have had strong leadership and now have genuine buy-in to and ownership of the results.

The challenge for the regulators will be to translate these aspirations into a plan. A plan which has the flexibility to adapt as new information comes to hand.

Other areas have not had such a positive outcome because they have lacked some key elements for success. Broadly those key elements are:

- The first being the composition of those taking part.

o All stakeholders that will be affected by the outcome should be represented around the table. If important constituencies are left out you cannot, in all consciousness, claim the process to be a collaborative community outcome.

- The second key feature is good information.

o This should be the best peer reviewed science available combined with local expert knowledge that is openly disseminated to not only the stakeholders around the collaborative table but the constituencies that they represent.

o Thirdly, you need a Chair who is the master of diplomacy and negotiations, who can keep the stakeholders in the room and is determined to succeed in getting all these players to come to a common view of the future.

- And finally, you need to have realistic timelines so that the process will finish but which also recognizes the time it takes for collaboration to happen.

Food security is a critical issue for the planet over the next fifty years. We must play our part and we, in New Zealand, can play our part with the supply of high quality, safe products to the betterment of our economy, all the while within environmental constraints.

Farmers have always been environmentalists, why else would they dedicate their lives to the land? Farmers also happen to be practical problem solvers.

Engagement is the key in this journey and in particular engagement of the dryland farmers who until now have been passive passengers but whose buy-in is critical for lasting solutions. Federated Farmers and the primary sector have worked hard on these problems and that work is bearing fruit.

With broad engagement, good will, the correct application of science, appropriate resources and time we can skip Kübler-Ross depression and move directly to acceptance on all sides.

This is our goal.

I wish you a fruitful conference and hope this view from agriculture will set the scene for the next three days.

ENDS

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