Food productivity vital to economy

Greg Campbell, Chief Executive, Ravensdown

It looks like a food safety issue started the COVID-19 pandemic and, somewhat ironically, food safety and food quality will be New Zealand’s way out of it, economically speaking.

The pandemic will have a major impact on global food supplies, causing shortages in the developing world and consumer demand in the developed world for safe and nutritious food products they can trust.

Consumers are looking for transparency and food products that can provide functional benefits such as greater immunity against disease. This is because another epidemic is inevitable. We’ve had a number in our time and there will be more.

New Zealand is uniquely positioned with a story to tell about how we protect our natural capital, social capital and our economic capital. While people here are understandably concerned about their day-to-day livelihoods, there’s some comfort in reflecting on our advantages as a country and our longer-term prospects, socially and economically.

Clearly, we have disadvantages too as this recovery needs to be an export-led recovery to overcome some of the disadvantages of a consumption recovery.

Being an exporter far from our major markets, we will need to position New Zealand as a country that is great to do business with. We need to be open and transparent about our means of production. We have traded on these ideals for a while, but we now have a window of opportunity to amplify these messages. There is an opportunity for a reset, while also protecting and maintaining the productivity of the sector.

New Zealand was founded on farming and this rebuild is going to be founded on farming again. Food needs nutrients and the world needs food. What food producers and the world needs is better nutrient management to ensure better environmental outcomes.

To protect our planet and our natural resources, we need policies from government and regulation to be proportionate to the impact on the environment. Getting that balance right is about how the primary sector can restore nature without giving up food security and sustainability of the quality of life we enjoy.

Ravensdown has an essential role to help facilitate this thinking by being part of The Aotearoa Circle and being part of the conversation. Farmers I speak to are proud to be playing their part by producing food for us here at home and for export.

The primary sector has already begun to take a systems approach to farming, treating catchments as one, increasing the chance of a sustainably balanced eco-system.

We are now thinking about how water, nitrogen, carbon inputs and outputs can be balanced and how agriculture can co-exist with natural habitats and urban environments to protect natural capital. When nutrients are removed from the system, they must then be replaced.  At Ravensdown, our approach is about smarter farming, which means providing farmers and growers with the tools, data and knowledge to achieve this balance with natural capital.

One area of concern when it comes to food security is the idea of nutrient stockpiling. There are several countries sitting on strategic deposits of nutrients. The last thing we want is for those countries to hold that for themselves. Fortunately, most, if not all, of those countries act as a good corporate citizen and make that available to the world’s population, because they have more than they could ever use. We need to ensure we have good relationships with countries not only as an exporter buying our products, but also supplying products we need to facilitate what we’re trying to achieve. Diplomacy plays a big part in this. Our government has the opportunity, and so do a number of our big exporters, to open the doors for Kiwi businesses to sell their wares, whether they’re products or services.

We shouldn’t forget this is a two-way street and we are a nation that imports products as well. In the case of Ravensdown, we import and add value to a lot of raw material that isn’t found in many places in the world, which our farmers need to grow what we export.

One of the reasons we support The Aotearoa Circle is their intention to develop a standard for sustainable agriculture. This should be our aim, so we don’t drive farmers off the farm when we need their outputs and their food production more than ever. There are already tools and models that can be used to steer the farmer toward optimising rather than maximising value from the land. At Ravensdown, we talk about optimising within the constraints of the natural environment.

There have been recent reports saying our water quality is improving. The question is whether it is improving fast enough? It wasn’t that long ago that some of the things we’re talking about weren’t in many people’s vocabulary, but now they are.

New Zealand farmers are world class at what they do. But if anything, smarter farming’s role for creating a better New Zealand is more important now, as a result of Covid-19, than ever before.

Sustainability in my mind is about the next generation being better off as a consequence of how we conduct ourselves today. While jobs have become even more critical, that doesn’t mean we should side-step that longer-term lens. The impacts of Covid have highlighted our ill-preparedness for climate change. Investment in a low carbon future can drive significant job creation, which government is really focused on, while increasing long-term economic and environmental resilience.

The Aotearoa Circle’s role is to help identify collective strategies for action through dedicated working groups bringing together public and private sectors to better understand each other and build stronger relationships and common goals. Varied membership means we can leverage diversity to drive innovation and change and find solutions more easily.

I believe The Aotearoa Circle can have a strong influence on how government resources are deployed going forward, on recovery, climate change, resilience, mitigation, conservation, and restoration. Low carbon mobility and job creation are going to be right at the forefront of their minds. Government can provide the right levers for business to invest in new jobs that provide climate change resilience, good economic outcomes and more equality.

The way government has stepped forward and shown leadership has probably surprised a few people in the private sector. Across the board people are also showing a significant amount of compassion and care. The values that define Kiwis have really started to come to the fore and in times of crisis we go back to those.

There’s a great opportunity for us, as leaders, to deliver. Yes, we will get through this. It will be hard, but we have an opportunity to position ourselves to come out of this better than when we went in. That may be a cliché, but I truly believe it.

I talk to my kids about the things they see now and the lessons they can take back from this that they hopefully will never have to see again in their lifetime. But it will set them up to look at what went well and what didn’t. Looking at things collaboratively and collectively, for the greater good is what is going to get us through.