Maori Research Institute Ltd. 1.95

Land ownership and use from a Maori Prospective

Maori land is a taonga, a living treasure, value is not solely for monetary considerations but to fulfil every elder's dream to hand down their land to their inheritors in a manner which allows living on the land and producing from a healthy chemical free being – the soil, supplemented by clear water.

Thousands of hectares of our lands have been subjected to the abuse of long term peppercorn leases where maximum production methods have been employed to realise maximum dollar profits over the shortest amount of time - for the term of the lease! This land is now returning to the Maori owners in a condition akin to a mangy starving depleted and dejected animal - full of a synthetic existence.

Regretfully there are many of those who have been employed on the mass production at any cost regime' lands who are indoctrinated with that destructive philosophy and we need to urgently address this predicament. It seems that man is using up the resources of the earth at too fast a rate, creating a micro processing technology which is making man redundant, and we constantly visualise this being a pre cursor to the destruction of human civilization.

Whereas Maori society over recent years withstood wave after wave of social and economic change, today the Maori part of Maori society is vulnerable, it is simply unrealistic to wait and hope and through the medium of organizations like the Federation of Maori Authorities we are supported in our aspirations to articulate change.

From a commercial perspective Maori soil based industry clearly demonstrates that we are different.

The future of our lands lie at the behest of our children - it is not for sale, it is a living treasure, and our ventures are generally structured for the long term. The advent of settlement of Treaty Claims and termination of long term leases has given us unprecedented opportunity to develop and facilitate building of research stations and laboratories - our greatest need is to know what we have got, the condition of the asset base, and the future use options most sustainable to the land and its' people.

We have donated our time and effort, absolutely conscious of the need to make material change, not desktop analogies. The results of our efforts will be shared across the board, promoting a joint exercise, sharing with others with similar concerns, irrespective of colour or creed, commercial or private, both rich and poor.

Educated leaders are ready and able to activate greater Maori leadership involvement, and if we take one step back to gain nine steps forward I believe we have the ability to produce natural chemical free product to New Zealanders, at a cost affordable to all. The regime' of introducing the younger educated generation may be a flaw in our thinking when we consider the challenges ahead, and the ridicule it may attract from certain arenas of modern society and business leaders, particularly those who advocate more cattle per acre on chemically enhanced fast growth crops with the mighty dollar being the determining factor.

Many of us believe our elders retain the knowledge we require to understand, respect and appreciate, and it is gratifying to know that the national body of the Federation of Maori Authorities have similar belief and are in the process of re-establishment of the mana of our elders. When we think about the status of our lands some of us are in that bracket in which we recall we didn't have computerisation, we didn't have flash milk sheds, we didn't have many foreign weeds either, and we didn't have chemical products simply because we couldn't afford them! We need to think about this. Talk to our elders about those good, tough old days when our best lands were leased and we worked the rougher country breaking in land by hand. We can employ some of those ideologies today.

We welcome all to join our journey.

Written by Tom Walters – Director & General Manager of the Maori Research Institute, Te Arawa FOMA