The 2003 reform of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) replaced the coupled direct support schemes by a Single Farm Payment (SFP), which will be mainly delivered to farmers irrespective of what they produce (hence 'decoupled' from production). The level of decoupling differs...

Animal welfare policies are often dealing with complex issues that are value laden and quite complex for New Zealand society to consider and evaluate. As a result, it may be difficult for agencies to converge upon policies that provide equally desirable and universally popular solutions. In some...

The National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management now requires that water quality objectives and limits be set for all water bodies in New Zealand. Where objectives result in the development of nitrate limits for waterways and development pressure is likely to make these limits difficult to...

Historically NZ dairy farming has held a position as the lowest cost, non-subsidized producers at the farm gate. Recently, this position has been eroded as a result of increases in labor and land costs, while other emerging countries, such as Argentina and Ukraine, have adopted lower cost...

Among the green lobby and the general public there is urgency for agriculture to clean up its act on environmental issues. Increased intensification of land use and in particular dairying has led to environmental spill-overs that the public is no longer willing to tolerate. Agriculture is in...

Producers of agricultural commodities treat world commodity prices as exogenous. Prices facing regional producers can also be considered exogenous when we aggregate producers over small districts, and even across New Zealand. Through estimation of a vector autoregressive (VAR) model, under a...

This paper describes further progress in a new approach to stakeholder consultation for policies about agricultural land uses and water quality in rural waterways; a process that was begun early in 2012. The initial consultation events provided the basis for a future draft of Greater Wellington...

This paper reviews the progress to date of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy and identifies key developments and emerging issues. The paper examines the provision of storage, water use efficiency, environmental flow adjustments, nutrients from land use intensification, biodiversity...