‘Economic vandalism': Harvests not homes on our fertile soils

NZ Herald

27-04-2025

So what does this mean?
While there are sufficient resources to meet everyone's basic needs, the world's resources are limited and insufficient to satisfy the insatiable desires and greed of those that accumulate wealth beyond what is necessary.
At a local level and in many ways, we are seeing this happening in our own region.
We, in New Zealand, are in the midst of a plan for growth for the next 30-plus years and this is being done through a process called the Future Development Strategy (FDS).
In Hawke's Bay, this FDS sets the blueprint for how we accommodate for the growth of our region for the next 100 or 200-plus years ahead.
Just as 'Right Tree; Right Place' pertaining to the proliferation of the scourge of pine trees blanketing some of our best farmland, we believe in the 'Right House, Right Place'.
We have plenty of unproductive land for planting houses so surely we should be growing them on these areas?
Over many decades we have seen the ever increasing cancerous growth of urban and industrial sprawl creeping over some of our best soils in the world, initiated by council officer planners and agreed to by elected city councillors.
This lust for more is unsustainable, especially for our future generations who will one day look back on these councils and say 'what were they doing?'
The FDS process has brought to the surface many instances for 'the lust for more' whereby land owners are pushing hard to cover and destroy forever our most precious soils with concrete and asphalt. Some examples include many areas in and around the Hastings city fringes.
This FDS replaces the disastrous old Heretaunga Plains Urban Development Strategy (HPUDS) document, however, this FDS Draft document basically just follows the same old blueprint that was in the HPUDS documents; more of the same pattern and policies of Greenfield developments on highly productive land.
By just adding on a little bit here and a little bit there, they call this 'just tidying things up' and successive councils have been 'just tidying things up' for far too long.
Then there's an area in western Havelock North where there is a push by landowners to rezone Plains Production zoned land to Urban Residential zoned land.
There's even a Mr Apple plan on the corner of State Highway 51 and Te Ara Kahikatea, in the Whakatū area, for an 'industrial park'.
Whakatū is an interesting case as it caters for 'wet industry'. Just 30% of the industry in Whakatū is 'wet industry'. The other 70% actually doesn't need to be there.
In my opinion, the majority of the people who live in this region don't want highly fertile food producing soils destroyed forever.
We need to stop this economic vandalism and focus on not growing houses and industry on our best food-producing land but rather preserve them for food production for our future generations.
The FDS process is the opportune time to have a comprehensive 'reset' of how we grow our region into the future and stop this wilful destruction of our golden goose.