Written by Anthony Aalto | Published in AgriculturE
If you can live on air alone – don’t read this!
But if you need food, then you need to check this out:
We have a real chance to commit Hawai‘i to substantially increase the amount of food we grow – which would help preserve farmland and boost our economy. At the moment, according to the USDA, we import at least 90% of everything we eat. Let’s face it: that’s dangerous and unsustainable.
On Wednesday the House of Representatives’ Committee on Agriculture is hearing HB2703,a bill that would require the state to double the amount of food we grow by 2020. If we failed to meet that target, an automatic, but temporary, moratorium would halt all reclassification of large tracts of land from agriculture to urban until the standard was met. It’s meant to encourage major landowners to permanently dedicate a portion of their lands to food farming.
Now there’s good news and bad news.
The good news: 38 of the 51 members of the House have leant their names to the bill. That indicates a really healthy level of interest.
The bad news: some senior members of the House are still pretty skeptical. And that’s where you come in. We need you to email testimony in support here. It doesn’t need to be long, but it should be heartfelt. Besides the comments above, here’s some of the things you could say:
- Around the time of statehood we used to grow 50% of our own food.
- In the last half century we’ve paved 53% of our farmland and huge developments threaten the best of what’s left
- In the event of a strike or natural disaster we have enough food to last about a week. That makes us incredibly vulnerable to supply disruptions.
- As we replaced locally grown produce with imported processed food we unleashed a wave of diet related disease like diabetes and obesity.
- Replacing just 10% of imported food with local produce would create more than 2300 jobs.
- We send billions of dollars overseas every year to import food – if that money stayed in the state it would have a huge economic impact.
- And above all: to be effective the target needs enforcement provisions – it’s essential that the threat of a reclassification moratorium remain in the bill.
Finally – we know this bill won’t magically fix all the difficulties farmers face. But if growing food becomes a statewide priority it will be much easier to address the many other issues that farmers face. Bottom line: we have chance to spark a farming renaissance in Hawai‘i.