This document discusses two diverging pathways for New Zealand agriculture since the 1980s: 1) a techno-centric productivist pathway focused on efficiency and invisibility of farming, and 2) a pathway focused on visibility, value-adding, and measuring environmental and quality attributes. It uses the example of the kiwifruit industry, which adopted a strategy of standardization, harmonization and consolidation under a global audit system to access higher-value niche markets. This created new production cultures focused on precision and quality over competition. The document argues visibility is important for sustainability, and energy use is emerging as an element to measure whole-system performance and add value for export industries.

1. NZ AGRICULTURE AND THE
ENVIRONMENT: DIVERGING PATHWAYS
TO A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE.
Prof Hugh Campbell. Centre for Sustainability.

2. Diverging Pathways: aspirational and real
Since the liberalisation of agriculture in the 1980s, the
subsequent pathways for development have often been
characterised in binary terms:
• Commodity versus High-Value Niche markets
• Volumes versus Values
• Productivity versus Profitability
I’m interested in how we have experienced diverging
pathways in terms of visibility and invisibility of agriculture
and food relationships.

3. The 1980s form an inflection point for
agricultural development…
• One trajectory followed in continuity with the increasingly
invisibility of food relationships since the Industrial
Revolution.
• The other began a process of ‘re-visibilising’ these
relationships.

4. Middle-ground history: the ’metabolic rift’
• Colonial New Zealand – Britain’s ‘Farm
in the Sth Pacific’.
• The longest food chains in the world.
• Producing familiar British foods
• Our landscapes were transformed to
look like British Farms.
• As a food system, it was dispersed over
great distance and its many components
are invisible to the other participants.
• This is not how food systems used to
be, but it is increasingly the norm under
industrialisation – ‘metabolic rift’.

5. 1840 2000

6. The ‘Great Burning’ – 1880s

7. The ‘Great Burning’ – 1880s

8. The ‘Great Burning’ – 1880s

13. The 1980s opened up a period of chaos in
which innovation hopefully would sprout.
• The neoliberal revolution in NZ agriculture was about more than
just making farming more ‘market-led’.
• It deconstructed the entire political framework for agriculture.
• Changed the institutional structure of agricultural science, but not
the underlying rationale of techno-centric productivism.
• A series of crises drove sectors in different directions.
• New Zealand began to experience two strongly diverging
pathways in land-use – and the science that supports it.

14. Pathway 1: techno-centric productivism
• Pathway 1 involved a new governance and
corporate structure around the same ‘productivist’
style of farming and the same farm products.
• Economic growth would be driven by a combination
of productivity/efficiency/cheapness.
• It also operates under the old conditions of
invisibility of farming and food relationships.
• Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment
Dr Morgan Williams argued in 2004 that this
trajectory in pastoral farming in NZ was a
‘timebomb’!
• It was also, at many levels, an invisible timebomb…

15. Pathway 2: Visibility
Other export industries began, after 1991, to try to produce
and sell using a logic of:
• Value-adding through quality claims.
• Measureable Qualities: place, taste, health, environmental
performance…
• To access higher value market niches, you needed to be
able to measure and demonstrate multiple qualities about
your producers, production sites and product.

16. A ‘visibility’ revolution: the arrival of ‘audit
culture’
• Pre-1992, food exporters applied quality-standards – usually
applied to sanitary, phytosanitary, and simple food qualities.
• Food safety was overseen by governments.
• 1992 – UK Food Act (among others) devolved responsibility to
retailers to maintain food safety and quality standards.
• A new world order for quality food exports started to emerge.
• A new world of ‘eco-labels’…. 370+ in Europe alone by 2010.
• Initially either: retailer-specific, or generated by a Third Party.
• Then converging on alliances of multiple audit systems – like
GlobalGAP.

17. • Kiwifruit, Peas and Apple exports were the initial movers in the 1990s.
• By 2000, other citrus, pipfruit, vegetable and wine exports were adopting
some level of ‘green’ auditing and certification for the international
market. These all consolidated under the GLOBAL-GAP audit system.
• Through the first decade of the 2000s, groups in sheep-meat, beef and
wool joined horticulture in exploring ‘green’ labels for high value markets.

18. The most successful exemplar of a ‘re-design and
visibilisation’ strategy is Zespri

19. The Zespri Strategy: Consolidation,
Harmonisation, Standardisation
The Zespri strategy was based around strategies to:
1. Harmonise standards under one global audit,
2. Standardise requirements for growers,
3. Consolidate the whole export sector under one system.
(plus, they recaptured their IP and introduced the Gold fruit)
• Export value: 1992- $300m, 2016 - $2,002m
• 32% of volume of globally traded fruit earning 65% of the
value of the global kiwifruit market.

20. Kiwifruit: Producing under Audit
• Not much early resistance due to industry crisis. But producers
did feel they were losing autonomy over their orchards.
• Kiwifruit goes ‘all in’ after 1998, and elaborated a huge audit
system via GLOBAL-GAP after 1999.
• Growers pushed back in 2005 to reduce the number of criteria in
the audit.
• Zespri placed key negotiators on GLOBAL-GAP committees to
make sure standards are ‘tuned’ to NZ conditions.
• What was unusual in 1998 is now the ‘new normal’.
• 85% of kiwifruit producers strongly resist changing the current
configuration of the industry.

21. Key shifts for producers…
• Changes in the technical aspects of crop management.
• Entirely new fruit (in some cases), and an entirely new
way of engaging with their orchards.
• New ’production culture’.
• Shift from competition/efficiency to precision/quality.
• Sector-wider commitment to produce the world’s ‘highest
value kiwifruit’.
• Learning to monitor, measure and evaluate multiple
dimensions of orchard systems.

22. Visibility/Invisibility and Sustainability
• This is an interesting relationship…
• Environmental harms are hard to deal with if you can’t see them.
• Breaking down farming systems into simple, mechanical components
(plus externalities) is an exercise in denialism.
• There are increasing threats to productivist agriculture as long term
impacts eventually become more visible – compromising production
systems and the ‘social license to farm’.
• Importance of feedback loops for resilience and adaptive
management?
• So… as researchers how do we make farming systems more visible?

23. Science Strategies for Sustainable
Transitions?
In agricultural research we generally tend to be aligned with
Pathway 1 or Pathway 2:
- techno-centric interventions or…
- re-designing and rendering visible measures of systemic
performance.

24. Pathway 1: scientists have generally been working on one of these
simple measures

25. Pathway 2: The Zespri strategy required an entirely
different kind of scientific approach and rationale

26. The Energy Question…
• Industries stuck in Pathway 1 struggle to see the
economic value of an energy strategy.
• For those in the audit revolution, energy is a logical
addition to new market audit systems. It builds in
potential quality claims and avoids potential loss of
market access.
• False start in 2007 with the ‘food miles’ crisis for NZ.
• Returned (in more positive form) with the
incorporation of energy measures in Sustainable
Wine NZ and the Zespri System – using the legacy
work of Dr Colin Wells at Otago.
• Rendering energy use ‘visible’ for adding value.

27. 15 years in the making…

28. GlobalGAP Control Points in The Zespri System for crop production

29. Summary: the energy moment is arriving
• Since the 1990s, two pathways have emerged for agriculture.
• They present different options for moving forward with very
different outcomes for Morgan Williams’ challenge for sustainable
land-use.
• A key quality of successful experiments like Zespri is the creation
of greater visibility and measurability in systems.
• Energy is arriving as a potential element of the visible
performance of food systems.
• It needs to be supported by more research aligned with the
rationale of rendering energy use measurable and ‘value-able’.

30. Thank you for the
invitation
Professor Hugh Campbell,
Centre for Sustainability.