Browning Steffan: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBrowning Steffan: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 28 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:4144. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STEFFAN BROWNING (Green): This Budget fails to make the visionary change we need for Aotearoa New Zealand especially in the era of urgency around climate change and especially with agriculture as a major component of New Zealand’s economy.Let us focus on agriculture. The Government in this Budget is maintaining its approximately $10 million spend on the Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre and on some pastoral research as well. Its contribution is all around climate change mitigation. But what are those things that the agricultural greenhouse gas consortium is up to? It is looking at inhibitors to put in the rumen of cows for example. It is looking at nitrification inhibitors—the same sort of thing that we found when we had nitrification inhibitors for a short period until we found it in our milk that was also damaging flora and fauna in streams. Those are the sorts of things it wants to do. It wants to get inside the gut of the cows and change it treat it like a factory rather than as an animal that could be producing in a more natural way.Where in this Budget is there a decent allocation of anything—in fact where is any allocation for the organics sector which has solutions for these things as we speak? The Government is doing $10 million there in mitigation. Organic milk for example at this moment makes up only 1 percent of production. But there is a mismatch. Organic milk is $10000 per tonne for milk powder if any of us wanted to buy it off Fonterra at the moment. All Fonterra can get for its conventional milk powder is $3000 per tonne. The farmers do not get all that balance but this Government should be doing something to acknowledge that value proposition when it wants to double export values.It also should be looking at the fact that the greenhouse gas consortium is wanting to look at soil carbon. Well organics in dairying has 28 percent higher carbon storage in the soil. We already have the answers. There are 43 percent more earthworms. There is more diversity. It is a more resilient pasture that will be able to resist some of the issues around climate change whether that be flooding or drought—it has a higher capacity around resilience. It has a massive 58 percent less nitrate leaching into waterways. Where is the money for organics to be part of our “100% Pure New Zealand”?Another aspect that really concerns me is that this Budget is finally doing another pesticide residue test in baby food. The total diet survey that comes out theoretically every 5 years—Australia does it every 2 years—is overdue by a year. This Budget thankfully goes there but it is woefully inadequate and has just a minor amount of testing over a minor range of food. If we look at babies in particular and young children which is something that the Primary Production Committee has been looking at we know from evidence supplied there which is open to the public that this is woeful. This occasional spend is woeful. Pesticide residues are coming through food in a consistent way.In organics the level of pesticides found in food is very marginal but in conventional agriculture it is commonplace; the majority of foods carry pesticide residues. We could be going down the organic path which would look after our citizens and our community would reduce our health bill—it would reduce the cancers reduce the endocrine disruption issues reduce the neurological diseases if we went down that path—at the same time as mitigating climate change and dealing with our economy. Thank you. This Budget is woeful for agriculture.