A Big Island businessman has a plan to convert a vast amount of state land in East Hawaii into parcels for commercial farming.
Ken Fujiyama, former owner of the then-Naniloa Volcanoes Resort in Hilo and various other businesses, will hold a public meeting Thursday about a proposal to make 120,000 acres of state-owned land available for farmers in an effort to break Hawaii’s dependence on imported food.
“There’s a lot of talk among lawmakers about self-sustainability,” Fujiyama said. “I think there’s data about how 90% of our food is imported, and how that costs the state $300 million annually.”
In order to reduce the need to rely on out-of-state food providers, Fujiyama said an accordingly large amount of land would need to be available to farmers.
That land could be made available by establishing an ahupua‘a — a traditional Hawaiian subdivision of land — encompassing an enormous swath of conservation land stretching from the Hilo Watershed Forest Reserve north of the Daniel K. Inouye Highway to the Pu‘u Maka‘ala Natural Area Reserve just north of Volcano.
Fujiyama’s plan would place the conservation land — which is ordinarily managed by the Department of Land and Natural Resources — under the administration of the Department of Agriculture.
Under Fujiyama’s vision, the Ahupua‘a Zone would be managed by a private entity that would create a master plan for the area and lease the land to commercial farmers.
“The state would just collect the rent,” Fujiyama said.
Fujiyama acknowledged the enormity of the proposal, noting that the total acreage of the zone would exceed all the land owned by Parker Ranch, the island’s fourth-largest landowner. But, he added, more action is necessary to achieve the state’s food production goals.
“We have to make these hard decisions if we want to progress,” Fujiyama said.
Fujiyama said the current management of ag land is insufficient to increase food sustainability. Most farm parcels are too small for mechanization, he said, and there is no state financing for large-scale agricultural or forestry projects.
Fujiyama added that an aquifer exists beneath the Ahupua‘a Zone that could produce 100 times more water daily than the total daily use of the entire county, with no danger of exhausting its supply.
Earlier this year, Hamakua and Hilo Rep. Mark Nakashima, acting on behalf of Fujiyama, introduced in the Legislature a bill that would establish the Ahupua‘a Zone within the Department of Agriculture and authorize an entity to develop a master plan for the site.
Nakashima told the Tribune-Herald he introduced the bill because he “likes to honor all requests by (his) constituents,” but added that he wasn’t able to review the bill’s contents at the time because he was undergoing a kidney transplant.
In any event, the bill was not scheduled for a single committee hearing. Nakashima said there were certain “flags and concerns” among lawmakers that prevented its passage — chief among them being the extreme size of the zone and the lack of an existing plan to manage it.
“If I had to guess, DLNR wouldn’t want to give up this much conservation land, and the Department of Agriculture probably wouldn’t want to manage it,” Nakashima said.
Fujiyama said he knew the bill probably would fail, but asked that it be introduced in order to broach the subject among lawmakers.
A public meeting at 5:30 p.m. tonight in classroom 100 at the University of Hawaii at Hilo’s University Campus Building will be what he called the first step in lobbying efforts to reintroduce the proposal next year.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
