By Ben Hancock, an agricultural business/economics & environmental specialist at Beef + Lamb NZ
The debate over an urban-rural divide is a well-trodden path. From a recent piece of work I’ve been involved with at Beef + Lamb New Zealand, I believe there’s strong alignment between the public perception of environmental regulation and what the sector has been asking of the government.
BLNZ has consistently raised concerns about the significant administrative and financial burdens placed on farmers, and about what these prescriptive, one-size-fits-all rules will achieve. Recent announcements by the government about changes to some of the environmental regulations introduced over the past few years have been welcome.
My role as part of the BLNZ team is to provide insights for the sector’s advocacy. This supports the organisation’s continuing advocacy for the government to create enduring policy solutions that strike a balance between being workable for farmers and helping to provide consumers, markets and the public with reassurance of good environmental stewardship.
Public trust and confidence is important in giving our sector licence to operate, and we want the public to share our pride in the sheep and beef sector.
BLNZ regularly commissions data and analytics experts Kantar to survey the public on perceptions of the red meat sector. This has in recent years shown an upward trend in NZ public pride in our sector, with the public well aware of the sector’s contribution to economic growth and jobs, not to mention our reputation globally.
Building on this, we recently added new questions to the regular survey, designed to provide a snapshot of public perceptions of the scale of the need for environmental management rules, as well as the amount of rules farmers are required to deal with.
We wanted to find out the public’s view of the need for environmental regulation, in order to understand whether respondents felt farmers are environmentally responsible stewards of the land.
Respondents were presented with a broad range of statements on the need for environmental regulation, and could select as many options as they felt represented their perception of the sector.
Farmers can be heartened by public perceptions of them as both proactive participants in their environmental management and as stewards with a long-term view.
Kiwis also see regulation is required but the largest response was for this to be practical and workable and not jeopardise farmers’ livelihoods and rural communities.
Our report on the cumulative impact of environmental policies, released last year, showed that the disjointed rules introduced by previous government were going to put farmers under immense financial difficultly and in fact stymie environmentally proactive farmers.
It is encouraging to know the public don’t want this to happen. They want some progress, but the rules need to be pragmatic.
Respondents were also asked about the amount of environmental regulation placed on farmers.
BLNZ and other farming groups have for some time been calling for a pause, reassessment and simplification of environmental regulation.
Around 80% of respondents felt they had enough information to form an opinion on the amount of regulation farmers faced – possibly helped by recent mainstream media coverage of this issue.
Results showed public support for the sector’s contention that environmental regulation has overshot the mark, with more respondents stating there is too much than not enough – nearly 40% reported there was too much or a little too much environmental regulation, with only 22% saying there was almost not enough or not enough (see figure 2).
The responses to these questions indicates that the public is willing and supportive of some rollback to the environmental rules, but they are still wanting to know that progress will be made.
As a sector, however, we need to bear in mind that 22% were looking for some more rules and that there was also fairly strong support for some rules and for independent monitoring.
While the government’s policy rollbacks are important to ensuring farmers have practical and enabling rules to work within, our sector will still need to show environmental progress and continue to bring the public along with us.
Any policy changes that create public perception of avoiding all environmental responsibility, letting bad practices undermine the good work of most farmers and creating negative impacts on the environment, could shift the weighting of support for more government intervention.
The public support in this survey is encouraging for those of us who are engaging with and representing farmers and rural communities and working to get policy changes, as it shows we’re not in this alone.
