Much has changed the position of farming in New Zealand society since 1973, when the sector lost its privileged access to a large and lucrative market.
“That cued up a series of crises that got worse and worse, culminating in 1984 with Rogernomics and really the first moment in the colonial history of New Zealand where a government decisively turned its back on farming. Things have never quite been the same,” Otago University’s Professor Hugh Campbell, an expert in the sociology of agriculture, told the Embracing Urban Agriculture hosted by Lincoln University’s B Linc Innovation centre.
He listed a series of fractures over the past 40 years or so that changed how urban and rural New Zealand relate, starting with a series of food scares in Europe including the Chernobyl disaster and Mad Cow Disease, which shook consumers’ confidence in food safety.
Consumers were also shaken by biosecurity issues including rabbits and the illegal release of calicivirus in an effort to control them, as well as the PSA virus that hit kiwifruit growers.
Global environmental crises have also played a part as new generations worry about their future.
“I thought my generation were concerned growing up but no, we were just kind of mild compared with the level of alarm and concern now.”
He said the introduction of mixed member proportional representation (MMP) was pivotal.
“Prior to 1996 (when New Zealand had a first-past-the-post electoral system) Robert Muldoon could win three successive elections by stitching together parliament on the back of a series of marginal rural electorates, and the rural electorate were therefore really powerful in making government in New Zealand.
“MMP really changed a lot of rural New Zealand and a whole lot of bedrock certainties about how the world worked.”
And then, in 2002, the dirty dairying campaign “really blew things right open. The then Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Morgan Williams, published the first major government report which said ‘We’ve got a problem.’
“He said the very small proportion of New Zealand’s population that lives in rural areas and produces the vast majority of our export income will increasingly come under tension, and that, he said, is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.”
Campbell said NZ came late to an urban-rural divide compared with northern hemisphere countries, but he believes what geographers call the “contested countryside” has now emerged here, too. “In the UK they’ve had walking access rights, major political and then negotiated and legislated solutions to rambling and the right to roam and that kind of thing since the 1920s,, whereas for us it’s all very recent.”
What all this means for farming is that while in the middle of the previous century farmers had an absolute licence to farm, the arrival of the contested countryside has created some challenging dynamics.
But the way to bring urban and rural NZ back together is not by radicalising farming communities through the importing of political tropes and ideas from the United States, Campbell said.
“I’ve been writing about Groundswell quite a bit recently and this is not a political development that fills me with happiness,” he said.
“I think the ‘Us against the world, you attack one rural person, you attack us all’, is really unhelpful at the moment. It just obscures diversity and obscures the internal debate and creative discussion happening within rural New Zealand.
“We do need to work out ways to build social norms and networks around shared land use responsibility between country and city. I really think we need to celebrate the exemplars of best practice and you really have to stop defending the indefensible.”
