There
have been a couple of disturbing recent revelations by Radio NZ.
Firstly, that six of the ten biggest private
landowners in NZ are foreign-owned forestry companies (the forestry sector is
nearly 75% foreign-owned).
Secondly, that since the Coalition government came
to office in 2017, the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) has approved more than
$2.3 billion of forestry-related land sales.
Even this is not enough for the Government - it has
just been made public that Ministers Eugenie Sage and David Clark have given
Japanese forestry transnational giant Pan Pac Forest Products an exemption
from having to apply to the OIO to buy land until 2022.
This sets a very dangerous precedent.
The whole forestry
shemozzle is a perfect example of Rogernomics coming back to bite Labour on the
bum.
Jacinda wants NZ
to plant a billion trees (to create a carbon sink as NZ's major response to
climate change).
This is
reinventing the wheel because, until the 1984-90 Rogernomics government (and
the 1990-99 National government), NZ had a massive, world-leading, State-owned
forestry estate which had been built up over generations.
All gone, flogged
off to transnational corporations and other foreign owners as part of the
privatisation mania of that era (error, more accurately).
If that
short-sighted, smash and grab ideology had not prevailed, Jacinda would have
inherited her billion publicly-owned trees on Day One.
Forestry
(specifically pinus radiata plantation monoculture) was all the rage in the
90s. Remember the Wall of Wood? It was another boom and bust story, with no
processing to speak of, simply the bulk export of unprocessed logs for the
profit of foreign owners.
And in its wake,
the newly-privatised forestry sector garnered the reputation as the most
dangerous sector for its sub-contracted workers, with deaths and injuries far
too common. Not to mention the damage caused by clearfelling. All a legacy of a
race to the bottom mentality.
Once that boom was
over some forests
were ripped out to be replaced by dairy farms (which became the next
goldrush). Now the process is being reversed, as an increasing amount of farm
land is being bought up and replaced by forests, causing a growing rural
backlash in the process.
There's something
missing from this whole story - any glimmer of a State-owned, publicly-owned,
forestry industry.
If climate change
is our "nuclear free moment", as Jacinda has labelled it, and trees
are going to her Government's Big Idea to fix it, why is that vital response
being contracted out to foreign-owned forestry transnational corporations (some
of whom have very dodgy records) and their pinus radiata plantation
monoculture?
Where is the
evidence of any kind of planning (other than hoping that the foreign owners
will take care of it)?
Where is the
evidence of a large scale processing industry to take advantage of all this
timber?
Where is the
evidence of any kind of tree species diversity in these forests? Pinus radiata
monoculture was the poster boy of the 90s' boom. What lessons have been
learned from that?
We had our own huge
and well-established forestry industry once. It was given away by the
ideologically blind for the benefit of private and foreign profit.
The State
needs to play a much more hands on role in this industry that has suddenly been
thrust front and centre into the limelight.
All it is doing is
relying on the tried and failed nostrum of The Market (aided by a goodly dose
of corporate welfare to sweeten the deal for the forestry transnationals).
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