As mandated by law, the state Land Use Commission (LUC) is plowing ahead, along with affected landowners and stakeholders, to see through the state’s Important Agricultural Lands (IAL) policy. But is the decades-long vision for a robust farming industry a mere mirage?

In 1978, the Constitutional Convention added a section to Hawaii’s Constitution requiring agricultural protection, self-sufficiency and diversification — but it wouldn’t be until 2005 that the Legislature enacted the IAL law to protect agriculture tracts statewide, with criteria for defining such lands and processes to preserve them. Incentives followed, such as tax credits for landowners, enabling big stakeholders such as Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin and Kamehameha Schools to voluntarily commit thousands of acres to be preserved for ag.

In all, the city has identified 41,407 acres as IAL on Oahu — a complex mapping that goes to LUC public hearing on Wednesday; it includes 1,781 parcels of private farmland covering some 11% of Oahu.

It’s an unprecedented process for mandatory ag preservation that could well draw challenges from some of the 1,800 landowners, with no clear method for mitigation.

All that uncertainty is compounded by uneasiness over the goal, as signs mount that the noble farming cause may already be lost. Much has changed in the 40-plus years since the Con Con codified the continuance of agriculture as sugar was dying in the 1970s, and then pineapple in the 1990s. The intent to protect lands to keep farming prominent, and attempts to diversify, are running up against the hard wall of reality.

Nowhere is that clearer than in a thought-provoking University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization briefing paper last month by Sumner La Croix and James Mak, “Reviving Agriculture to Diversify Hawaii’s Economy.”

It underscores the difficulty for small farms here, which have tended to perform poorly. In 2017, for instance, 78% of local farms had annual sales of under $25,000; 57% of local farms saw net losses in 2017. “Overall,” the report noted, “farming here has not been a very profitable business recently.”

Further, the University of Hawaii researchers call the state’s strategies to revive agriculture faulty and extremely costly. And pointedly: “The IAL program is also deeply flawed. Landowners of prime agricultural land dedicate their land to long-term use in agriculture in exchange for an array of benefits supplied by the state and counties.

“Promised benefits from the state and counties have, however, not materialized.”

It’s amid this landscape that the Land Use Commission will be vetting the city’s IAL map. Whatever Oahu’s agricultural future, only one thing is certain: It will be a tough row to hoe.