Posted on: Thursday, April 14, 2005

ISLAND VOICES

By David Cole

We have all heard the call for an island future where our lands are green and beautiful, our waters are blue and clean, and we are all nurtured with fresh homegrown foods harvested from our pristine waters and healthy soils.

Such a future is within our reach, if we make the right decisions today. One of the keys to creating this future is the development of a robust agricultural sector that provides fresh food and environmental services such as aquifer recharge, erosion prevention, carbon sequestering and lush open spaces. There is great potential for such an industry, now that the plantation system has largely dissolved and a group of entrepreneurial farmers has begun to cultivate a diversified selection of products.

However, this future is threatened by high land, labor and logistical costs. These factors have conspired over the years to make Hawai'i a virtual cargo cult — where over 90 percent of our food calories and nearly all of our fuel for transportation and energy production are imported from elsewhere. To compound matters, desperately needed infrastructure for connecting time-sensitive fresh agricultural capacity to remote markets has been conspicuously absent.

Despite these structural impediments, a lively local agricultural economy is beginning to emerge to meet the growing demand for fresh, locally grown produce.

Hawai'i consumers are increasingly health-conscious and want their food to be as fresh as possible — a trend manifested on the menus of our local chefs and in the farmers markets that are sprouting up across the Islands. There is also a growing understanding of the aesthetic value of farms, which in turn supports our vital visitor industry.

For our small farmers to truly thrive, they will need economic and efficient access to local markets. Protein, fruit and vegetable purveyors on the Neighbor Islands need access to O'ahu's relatively huge market as well as the quality-conscious markets on Maui, Kaua'i and the Big Island. In short, growers need a transportation infrastructure that enables them to send their products to market with minimal handling.

The roll-on/roll-off, door-to-door and same-day services that are possible with the proposed Hawaii Superferry can do more than any other single factor to promote diversified agriculture throughout our state. This is why Maui Land & Pineapple Co. invested in the Hawaii Superferry last year, and it's why our board voted last month to invest $18 million in the development of a new food-processing facility in Kahului that would enable growers on Maui to prepare value-added products for statewide consumption.

When was the last time a major Hawai'i landowner was prepared to invest substantial sums to build local agricultural capacity? Without access to local markets, this investment makes no sense.

Beyond the obvious need to connect local capacity to local markets, we need to be concerned about the pending shortage of fossil fuels and our state's extreme dependence on this energy source.

Aircraft, currently the only means for people to travel between the main islands and a major carrier of freight, are particularly inefficient on short-haul flights. As we grow more sensitive to energy costs, it makes sense to rely on rapid ferries, which are 10 to 15 times more energy-efficient at moving cargo than aircraft.

As a matter of transportation security, common sense dictates that we have multiple transport methods for uniting our islands in times of crisis — as the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, showed when the fast ferries serving Manhattan kept running when all other public transportation modes were shut down.

Finally, we would be wise to invest in food security. Relying upon the kindness of faraway strangers to ship food to us in an era of increasing uncertainty is unwise. As islanders, we know that our resources are finite and we can only rely on ourselves when the fossil fuels are gone and the miracle of the energy-intensive green revolution fades to black.

With the threatened demise of funding for harbor improvements and the loss of the Superferry, we stand at the proverbial fork in the road.

One road celebrates our interdependence as fellow islanders and enhances our food and transportation security.

The other leads us back to business as usual — limited transportation choices, continued dependence on Mainland food sources and increased vulnerability in the face of dwindling oil supplies.

David Cole is chairman, president and CEO of Maui Land & Pineapple Co. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.