Our Strategic Priorities
Last year MAF identified these three areas as strategic priorities. The strategic priorities are areas where MAF can make critical contributions towards our high-level outcomes. Each priority links to one or more of MAF's intermediate outcomes. Over time, these strategic priorities are being integrated into business as usual.
Sustainable Development
Sustainable development for MAF is defined as the agriculture, food and forestry sectors delivering maximum socio-economic benefits to New Zealanders in current and future generations, through the inter-relationships between:
- people;
- the biophysical environment; and
- the natural resources people draw from that environment;
while maintaining over time the environment's life-sustaining capability and functioning.
MAF has positioned itself as a leading sustainable development agency, and is currently developing a framework which will promote the sectors' delivery of the benefits of sustainable development.
MAF's work in the area of sustainable development covers issues of climate change, water allocation, land use, and facilitating the primary sectors' delivering on their economic potential now and into the future.
The agriculture, food and forestry sectors remain the engine room of the economy, responsible for over 60 percent of merchandise export earnings. They are at the centre of efforts to lift New Zealand's economic growth rate and standard of living (see box “Government's Economic Transformation Priority” on the following page). The success of these sectors is built on protecting and adding value to our natural and biological resources, including fertile soils, plentiful clean water, managing our pests and diseases and ensuring the disease-free status of our livestock. These resources, together with our temperate climate, and a history of innovation within the primary sector, are at the heart of New Zealand's comparative and competitive advantage.
Sustainable development of New Zealand's natural and biological resources is essential to ensure today's prosperity is not at the expense of tomorrow's. Even today, the global trading environment is driven by changing social values and consumer demand. Increasingly, overseas markets are demanding evidence of the energy efficiency, low environmental impact and wider sustainability of production processes on farms, orchards and vineyards.
MAF is leading the Sustainable Agriculture objective of the New Zealand Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy - for efficient and low-carbon farms, orchards and vineyards. Proposed actions include establishing a fund to demonstrate a model energy efficient farm/orchard/vineyard by 2008, developing a suitable model farm programme by 2009, scoping opportunities for bioenergy use by 2009, and investigating broadening supply options (particularly renewable energy technologies) for rural households. Lifting the energy efficiency of our land-based businesses and their use of “clean, green” renewable energy can be a differentiating feature for New Zealand in international markets. MAF also provides support for the Strategy's objective of introducing renewable transport fuels.
The ability of New Zealand's agriculture, food and forestry industries to compete in international markets increasingly depends on a demonstrable commitment to sustainable development, along with robust product assurance, and animal welfare. There is increasing consumer demand internationally for sustainably produced products, especially in premium markets e.g. the UK, EU. “Food miles” and associated issues represent an emerging risk of adverse perceptions in these markets that must be addressed urgently.
Sustainable development is helped by the protection of the natural environment, productive resources, and human health, and from biosecurity pests and diseases.
Government's Economic Transformation Priority
MAF has a key role to play towards the Government's priority of Economic Transformation. This priority aims to progress New Zealand's economic transformation to a high income, knowledge-based market economy, which is both innovative and creative and provides a unique quality of life to all New Zealanders.
The relationship between the economy, environment and natural resources continues to be a major area of Government focus. Within Economic Transformation, MAF co-leads with the Ministry for the Environment the Environmental Sustainability sub-theme, which is in turn divided into work on climate change, water and sustainable land management.
MAF also contributes significantly to the Economic Transformation sub-theme of growing globally competitive firms. Growing and retaining high value businesses in New Zealand implies a link with the local environment and resource base. New Zealand's productive base is inherently localised and linked to the natural environment; it is an inalienable, environmental and resource base - it cannot be moved elsewhere. While manufacturing capability and cheap labour are abundant in the world, high quality natural environments are becoming ever scarcer in a highly-populated world. While resources such as oil and minerals are finite, land, soil, water, biological resources and wind energy and their products - food, fibre, and fuel - are sustainable and inexhaustible provided they are safeguarded - including from biosecurity pests. The protection and integrity of New Zealand's resource base underpins our export performance.
Climate Change: Emerging Challenges
MAF will be in the front line of work on climate change, which is crucial to New Zealand's future. The agriculture and forestry sectors will bear the brunt of the economic and environmental impacts of climate change, such as drought and flood. There will be significant impacts in relation to food production. International agreements on climate change such as the Kyoto Protocol will only increase in importance. A changing climate will also change pest profiles, potentially making it easier for some biosecurity pests and diseases to spread, and this will be a major challenge to the biosecurity system.
Climate change presents a threat, not only to land-based industries, but also to international markets. For example, there is already a suggestion that pressure could be exerted on nations exporting to Europe to address climate change. There will be impacts for NZFSA with regard to trade. Supermarket chains are becoming increasingly focused on the environmental image associated with traded products, especially in relation to greenhouse gas impacts.
While 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally arise from agriculture, New Zealand has a unique profile, with 49 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector. These emissions are comprised of methane from ruminant animals, and nitrous oxide from animal waste and nitrogen fertiliser use. The uptake of technologies such as nitrification inhibitors will be a key contributor to the reduction of emissions from nitrate point sources. There is also evidence through life cycle analysis that many New Zealand products have a lower net impact on global greenhouse gas emissions than competing products from countries with more energy- and resource-intensive production systems.
The forestry sector is integral to New Zealand's response to the challenge of climate change. In New Zealand, deforestation of plantation forests has emerged in recent years after a long period of net afforestation. A number of competing interests and objectives must be reconciled in developing a sustainable climate change policy that deals with these interests and objectives.
The Permanent Forest Sink Initiative (PFSI) is a new initiative directed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and therefore human-induced climate change. The PFSI exploits the ability of forests to sequester carbon; under the Kyoto Protocol, this process generates “forest sink credits” that can be sold on the international market.
Since New Zealand's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol an opportunity has opened up for landowners, particularly of largely marginal land, to establish permanent forests and gain “forest sink credits”. The PFSI therefore provides a new economic use for some of New Zealand's most difficult and erosion-prone land.
Contact for Enquiries
Strategy and Performance Group
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
Pastoral House
25 The Terrace
PO Box 2526, Wellington
Tel: +64 4 894 0100
Fax: +64 4 894 0738
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