Nuffield scholar Kerry Worsnop says a complete overhaul of the policy-making process is the only way New Zealand will succeed in creating a food production system that meets the needs of all stakeholders, both here and abroad.
Speaking to the Primary Industries Summit in Wellington, Worsnop said our current system isn’t designed for the complex issues of sustainability, water quality and environmental improvement.
“What we tend to do is come up with a great idea, do a bit of consulting, then we pass it on to the implementation teams.
“It’s been finalised and ticked off. And then the implementation team starts to use it with the people on the ground, the farmers or the councils or whoever it is that needs to use this policy. More often than not you’re going to find something else bubbles up, somewhere else, and you go, ‘Whoa – there’s a couple of bits here that we didn’t expect, we need to change that’ but that policy team’s moved on to the next thing.”
Worsnop said it is often years before the issue pops back onto the political agenda for a second look, leaving those on the ground to deal with unworkable regulations.
“By then there is collateral damage, left, right and centre, and the people in this have been hurt badly.”
Worsnop proposed a system that included the crucial voices from the outset – including those with capability and experience, which in agriculture’s case is farmers themselves.
“Nuffield gave me a chance to move from someone who was quite cynical to someone who knows now that, yes, it can be done. I saw it done.
“I saw people using these tools, using this language, and the effects were transformational.“
Another key point Worsnop highlighted was the vast difference in how New Zealand agriculture functions when compared with other countries.
NZ is completely market-driven, and lives or dies on its ability to perform in the global marketplace.
“I hadn’t understood that we are by a mile more market-focused as producers than just about anyone else in the developed world.
“And I hadn’t understood that everything we do, we do to try and mitigate our downside risk, because no one is going to catch you.
“I’m a sheep farmer, I can speak from experience.
“So our farmers have geared themselves really, really specifically to respond to deregulation in a way that no one else anywhere else has done, because no one else anywhere else did it the way that we did it.”
Farmers overseas are paid to do the sustainability work that farmers here are, for the most part, funding themselves, she said.
“What we don’t necessarily understand is that most of the people that we compare ourselves to have a lovely bridge going from one side to the other, and that is in the form of payments of some kind or another.”
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