As the Government grapples with building another 100,000 homes just to meet shortages, planners and producers are nervously watching continued population growth, much which will be in the country’s key farm produce regions.
Until 2016 New Zealand was losing just over 100,000 hectares a year of growing land, whether to urban development or the proliferation of lifestyle blocks increasing by 5800 a year.
Economist Shamubeel Eaqub has challenged the Government to deliver a policy that integrates population growth, environment and food policies to better manage the country’s bill-paying land resource.
And based on past experience he has good reason to be concerned.
Auckland city has swallowed 10,500ha of high-quality land over the past 35 years, with a growth rate of about 3% adding 21,000 extra people a year.
Population predictions are that things won’t slow and Auckland will gain another 26,000 people a year between now and 2050, taking its population to 2.3 million.
The fears of Eaqub and horticultural producers are that the past will be repeated and at least another 10,000ha of high-quality soils will go under urban expansion to house Auckland’s extra 500,000 people by 2050.
The loss is doubled because not only is the soil lost but the population that needs feeding from remaining land will have grown by a third.
But down the motorway Waikato and Bay of Plenty growth predictions are just as high, with further soil loss to homes likely.
Those regions, growing by 30%, will by 2050, add another 200,000 people, equal to Hamilton’s population today.
Combined, the total extra population of the triangle formed by Tauranga, Hamilton and Auckland will have an extra 750,000 mouths to feed.
Meantime, the Government is weighing up a Productivity Commission report on a low-carbon economy by 2050 that supports a move to more plant-based food production, itself requiring more quality, flat land.
Economic and public policy research agency Motu recommends shifting from meat and milk production to horticulture, requiring at least 100,000ha more horticultural land and possibly up to 250,000ha.
It is a conflict not lost on cropping and produce growers.
Horticulture NZ general manager John Seymour said the fact no two soils are the same and nor are the regions they are found in is often lost on policy makers who model land loss in one area as a simple problem solved by using soil in a less populated area.
“But, as we know, it is not as simple as that, with the challenges of growing conditions and the cost of transport from those areas to the market.”
And none of that takes account of the squeeze on productive land from the other direction as the Government’s Billion Trees scheme gets going.
