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New Zealand: The challenge for urban agriculture in Auckland

Aerial view of OMG – Organic Market Garden in Eden Terrace. Image – Brick Content

Even the smallest scale of food production for commercial purposes is outlawed in our housing and residential zones: meaning, you can’t grow veggies in your own backyard to sell to your neighbours without a resource consent.

By Charlotte Billing
Greater Aukland
Dec 9, 2021

Excerpt:

In Aotearoa there’s little urban agriculture, even though people are excited by the concept of urban farms. Mayor Phil Goff this week released an ambitious Climate Action package that specifically champions more m?ra kai in the city. And, the C40 network, of which Auckland is a member, recommends “cities oversee urban land use for local production and […] encourage more local production”. But in spite of the momentum of this growing public mandate, urban agriculture has struggled to gain a foothold anywhere.

Why is this? Is it a lack of available land or labour? Or is it something else?

New research has just been published that gives some answers; that our planning regulations are the major barrier. Planning the urban foodscape: policy and regulation of urban agriculture in Aotearoa New Zealand comes out of Te Kura Aronui – School of Social Sciences at The University of Waikato, Kirikiriroa, from researchers Christina Hanna and Pip Wallace. They assessed urban farms and market gardens in Aotearoa’s most populous cities, and the resource management policies that govern them.

Their research found that there is no clear pathway to urban farming or urban agriculture in any of the cities they assessed, because the definition for such an activity doesn’t exist in our legislation.

Read the complete article here.