“South Australia’s food producing and agricultural areas are one of our primary and premium industries which we are all immensely proud of and which we want to preserve and protect.
“These areas, in turn, protects our food security, economic growth, local jobs, prized tourism areas and our state’s global reputation as a premium producer of food and wine.”
No, that is not taken from a Primary Producers SA policy statement, but you could be forgiven for thinking as such.
They are the SA Government’s own words – the rationale behind designating key regions around metropolitan Adelaide as to be protected from housing sub-division as Environment and Food Production Areas.
This was spelled out in the 30-year Plan for Greater Metropolitan Adelaide (now the Greater Adelaide Regional Plan, or GARP) released in 2010 and updated in 2017 with the establishment of EFPAs.
However, on Monday the government announced its intention to introduce legislation to change these safeguards and redraw the EFPA boundaries to release land for more housing growth and remove the urban infill target.
By “greenfield”, planners and developers mostly mean agriculturally productive land; and the areas now targeted include some of the most arable and sustainably productive land in SA.
If food production were valued in the same way as protecting live music venues, the erosion of EFPA protections would be unthinkable.
Instead, it appears to be yet another signal that farming’s role in our state’s identity is being systematically diminished.
The argument made by state planners is that this realignment is needed now to secure land supply not just for the next 15 years as proposed in the 2010 plan, but now for the next 30 years.
The areas proposed for rezoning would provide a potential 61,000 new homes over this extended 30-year period.
PPSA was advised 18 months ago that these proposals were a draft and, as such, we have been engaging with the SA Planning Commission since then to put forward our very real concerns about them.
Our concerns are not just with this expansion of paving over scarce arable land.
It is also about the growing competition for water resources – essential for both agriculture and the environment – amid increasing pressures from population growth.
At a time when the cost-of-living is impacting all South Australians, can we really support a legislative reform that, at its worst, would in the long-term push more intensive agriculture into more and more marginal regions, driving up input requirements to sustain productivity as well as the costs of production, and thus the cost of food even further?
SA was declared to be in a climate crisis in 2022.
However, more expansion of wall-to- wall Colorbond fencing and eaves touching from house to house is the antithesis of biodiversity conservation and climate adaptation.
This narrow view of the value of EFPAs to SA’s standard of living is what happens when planning decisions prioritise short- term development over long-term strategy supporting agricultural sustainability and the very values we hold dear as a state.
Agriculture and regional South Australians need to have a permanent seat at the planning table.
This column was written by PPSA Chair Simon Maddocks and originally appeared in the 20 March 2025 edition of Stock Journal.
