NZ Must Prioritise Food Security, Says HortNZ's Malley

He says NZ cannot just rely on international freight delivering canned food from other countries to us and says the importance of our vegetable sector cannot be overestimated.

His comments come as concerns grow about highly productive land going into housing and vegetable processing plants facing closure, as well as trees replacing sheep on our hill country.

Pressure on Productive Land

Malley told Rural News that it's costly to produce food in NZ and there is an ongoing need to increase crop yields by introducing new and better plant varieties to counter this.

Also, New Zealand needs to look at the distribution of value along the food chain to make sure growers remain financially sustainable.

Water and Māori Land Access in Northland

He says there are also other issues in Northland where his orchard is based.

"One of the issues is making sure we have enough water, and the other one is releasing some of the Māori land so that it can be more productive.

"To do that there needs to be an appropriate investment structure, because that land is currently not in a high production and to change that will require capital investment and require the development of new infrastructure," he says.

With Māori land, says Dermott, there is a need to understand that they will not sell their whenua and new economic structures need to be created so that new capital can be injected without that being linked to debt on their land.

Rural News is aware that this has already happened in Māoridom with iwi joining forces, especially in the kiwifruit sector, to create larger and profitable entitites.

In terms of blueberries, Malley says his company already has a high tech packhouse which is quite capable of handling all the expansion. He says they also see the potential for growing kiwiberries.

Accessing New Varieties

Malley says if NZ is to increase its horticultural exports it must have the same access to new plant varieties as our competitors.

He says he fully accepts the need for a quality biosecurity regime and the need to manage risk and not bring anything into NZ that would destroy the hort sector.

He says this is also linked to an expectation of our customers that we are moving to a softer approach to deal with managing diseases. In the past, much greater use has been made of 'hard' chemicals.

Malley says this means that if we bring in overseas material, we need to be sure that it will fit within our system of managing diseases and pests.

"We need to look at perhaps shifting our focus as a country to getting a guarantee those pests are better managed offshore, rather than just presuming that they are. That means we need to insist that those people overseas show us that they have done the right thing, in terms of what we do, like monitoring our crops every week," he says.