“This Industry is Wrecking Everything Locals Love”: Faehrmann Calls for Urgent Regulation of Blueberry Farms on the Mid North Coast
Greens MP Cate Faehrmann has delivered a scathing speech in the NSW Upper House, calling for urgent intervention by the Minns Government to regulate the intensive blueberry industry across the Mid North Coast, after recently visiting the area and meeting with distressed residents in the Nambucca Valley and surrounding regions.
Ms Faehrmann has written to Planning Minister Paul Scully seeking an explanation as to why his department recently rejected a modest proposal by Nambucca Valley Council to require development consent for new horticulture operations in rural zones - reforms that would help limit the environmental and social damage caused by the blueberry industry - and to intervene to ensure controls are put in place.
“The Council simply wants basic safeguards, like requiring a development application for large new blueberry farms, and setting minimum buffer distances between farms and people’s homes,” Ms Faehrmann said.
“Instead, the Minister’s department has dismissed this entirely reasonable request, ignoring years of community outcry.”
In Parliament, Ms Faehrmann slammed the industry’s destruction of sensitive bushland, ongoing pollution of waterways, and its impacts on neighbours and wildlife. She referenced alarming findings by Southern Cross University, including nitrogen levels in waterways up to 800 times higher than safe thresholds, and dangerous concentrations of arsenic and methylmercury.
She also called out the use of chemicals such as imidacloprid - a pesticide banned in the EU - which has been linked to mass fish kills near blueberry operations.
“You have to see it to believe it. Residents who once looked out onto rolling green hills now face a wall of white netting and plastic tunnels just metres from their homes,” Ms Faehrmann said.
“There are no requirements for a DA, no notification to neighbours, and no protection for koala habitat being bulldozed as we speak. This is a planning failure of epic proportions.”
“The community has done everything right. They’ve made submissions, attended meetings, raised concerns, and they’ve been ignored.
“It's time for the Minister to stand with local residents and the environment, not an industry that has run roughshod over both,” said Ms Faehrmann.
A video of Cate Faehrmann’s speech in Parliament can be viewed here, and the transcript can be found here.