Organic farming seen as salve for economic ills

Press, 12 May 1984, Page 8

Organic farming seen as salve for economic ills

Organic farming could ease New Zealand’s economic problems, according to Labour’s spokesman on the environment, Mr Mike Cullen. Addressing the Soil Association’s annual conference in Christchurch yesterday, Mr Cullen said that

“naturalness” was New Zealand’s best asset. “Overseas there are growing markets for food grown in a completely clean environment without chemical manipulation,” he said. A recent Ministry of Agriculture report showed that it was possible to use less fertiliser than had been generally accepted in conventional farming circles. Mr Cullen said that the “organic alternative” was viable. High nitrate levels in some water supplies were reaching toxic or near toxic levels, exceeding World

Health Organisation standards, he said. These high levels, linked to a child blood disease and some forms of stomach and bowel cancer, were caused by the use of nitrogen-fixing plants, pasture legumes, animal excreta, and fertilisers. Areas of particular concern were pastoral farming on the Canterbury Plains, fruit-producing on the Waimea and Heretaunga plains, and dairying in Waikato and Taranaki, he said. This could cause economic as well as environmental problems because European and North American food consumers were very conscious of health risks. “Governments overseas are only too willing to use these sorts of matters as excuses for the erection of non-tariff trade barriers against us,” Mr Cullen said. Accelerating erosion, caused by the lack of native lowland forest, heavy stocking, inadequate rotation, and too much watering, was already threatening New Zealand’s earning capacity, he said. A strange complacency about the problem existed in most farming and Government circles. New Zealand’s primary production depended on “monocultural systems,” he said. The recent scare over the cancer-causing blight, dothistroma, in Pinus radiata highlighted this. “At the very least we must respond by rapidly expanding the planting rates for 'JJ-her exotic species.”