Danny Simms: Threats to New Zealand’s Agricultural Export Industry

In New Zealand we are seeing a seismic shift in land use. If it was based on straight economics, we should accept it. However it is not. Vast areas of productive farmland is being taken out of production and planted in pine trees.

This is being driven exclusively by industry using our land to offset their carbon emissions.

 The carbon credit subsidy driven rush to plant tens of thousands of hectares of productive farmland in pine trees must stop.

Eric Crampton: Land owners - Should I stay or should I grow?

One bit of the Climate Commission’s draft advice, released in March, seemed particularly strange.

The Commission worried that a surge in forest planting over the coming years would bring about a collapse in ETS prices in the 2030s and put New Zealand’s net zero commitments beyond 2050 at risk.

It seemed particularly strange for those who remember Howard Hotelling’s work on pricing of non-renewable resources over time. It’s standard drill on how to think about these kinds of problems.

Tony Orman: the Environmental Disaster of carbon farming

… about 72 per cent of pine forests were foreign-owned, with United States companies owning about 35 per cent and Asian companies about 12 per cent. –Keith Woodford, Professor of Farm Management and Agribusiness at Lincoln University, 2010

Rivers drying up

In April last year, I went trout fishing to a stream that is a tributary of the Wairau River. It is also an important spawning stream for both brown trout and probably some salmon. It is also a habitat for native fish.

At the road bridge just above its confluence with the parent river, it was a mere trickle. A couple of kilometres upstream it was dry river bed, whereas in previous decades it always had a healthy year-round flow.

The reason was not hard to identify.