Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick was on Q&A on Sunday, fronting up to Jack Tame's questions about the Greens' alternative budget.
Farming is central to everything. Growing food is fundamental to human wellbeing in ways we don't think about enough: if we don't grow food, we go extinct. That might seem silly to say but in New Zealand we treat farming primarily as an export earner rather than as domestic food security and resiliency.
As we go deeper into the climate crisis, this will change, food security will matter in ways we are not used to. We already have a cost-of-living crisis around the price of staple foods like meat and dairy. When extreme weather events and unusual weather seasons start to cause crop failures globally and locally, how we manage farming will matter a great deal.
A green vision of societal transformation that includes mitigation of climate change, adaptation to what is already locked in, and transition to sustainable economies and lifestyles, has to include protecting family farms from corporate take over, as well as opening the door wide to regenerative and other resilient methods of food production.
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