“Or I might hear about animal cruelty in the preparation of meat, eggs, or dairy products in a foreign country.”

Sorry to disillusion you but there is an incredible level of cruelty in animal products in our own supposedly caring country. In fact, European animal products would probably have been produced with a modicum less cruelty than New Zealand made. For example, in New Zealand, the following cruel practices are quite legal (see the Codes of Welfare at http://www.maf.govt.nz)

1. Keeping pigs in sow stalls and farrowing crates. These are so small the pigs cannot even turn around. When millionaire pork board boss Colin Kay was caught using stall that breached the law, MAF conveniently changed the law for him, instead of prosecuting. Sow stalls and farrowing crates are being phased out in some European countries and some US states

2. Battery hens. Illegal in Switzerland, Finland, Sweden and being phased out in the EC. Here the Egg producers federation have been lobbying government to keep us in the dark ages.

3. Broiler chickens. Up to 40% of these are in acute pain from lamenesss in the last week of their life according to a recent NZ study (compared with about 25% in Europe – still disgusting but better than our abyssmal record)

4. Dairy. Calves are separated from their mothers at birth. Causes grief for mother and baby. Dairy cows are worked harder than a cyclist at the tour de France according to scientist Mark Fisher, and they are slaughtered after 3 lactations.

5. Sheep. Mulesing (slicing the buttocks) is legal in NZ and Australia. Not performed in Europe.

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Mouldwarp

That’s a heck of a lot better. Thanks.

I don’t know what drives the supermarkets to not support change… but the market isn’t the perfectly efficient engine you expect it to be. It can have problems with local minima and inertia… and it needs to be prodded sometimes.

However, even on a very local level, I have always wanted to know where produce comes from . Corn sold on Long-Island for instance, is different from corn from Iowa…. you may not believe it but I can taste the difference. I can’t see it, and I can’t smell it, but I can definitely taste it. Now I can’t really tell Iowa from Kansas, but I really do want to know where it comes from.

I don’t trust a lot of foodstuffs coming from China. I don’t trust the toys, how can I trust the foods? This is a safety issue. Antifreeze in toothpaste… lead in paint… what was it in the cat food?

Maybe, if enough people ask, one of the market chains will break with the others and we’ll see a choice in the market. As long as there is no break, there is no market signal to be heeded. That’s the inertial reference.

The question of “if it is safe” isn’t answerable. There’s no entity guaranteeing THAT for many overseas products. Your argument is weakened by the lack of reliability of that knowledge.

IF carbon pricing were properly pushed into every part of the food supply chain AND there was some way to be sure that all food, no matter where it was from, was safe, I’d accept that CoOL wasn’t needed.

Neither of those assumptions/assertions are true. The supermarkets may need a nudge before any of them will move, but if all markets are equally regulated none gains an advantage by changing or not-changing. Easier on them. Standardization is also a desireable outcome. What each market says about CoOL is going to look different to consumers and comparing apples with apples allows competition between the markets to make a difference. .

respectfully
BJ

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Ari,

– “Nobody wants to discriminate about the nationality of a product without a reason. Even “supporting local businessâ€? can be a legitimate reason. Globalisation has costs and people have a right to choose in their shopping habits whether they support it or not”

They are certainly free to discriminate in any way they see fit, I agree; be their reasons noble or despicable, informed or ignorant. That’s what freedom means.

However, there are an *endless* number of ways that people can and do discriminate; some of which you will agree with, and others you won’t.
Why do people have a “perfect right” to the information that just happens to concern you, but not an equal right to a vast mass of other details, such as I mentioned before?
Why do you think that supermarkets should be forced to provide the information that *you* are interested in and yet which does not interest many others in the slightest? Given the endless concerns and prejudices of you and everyone else, why is it that yours – and only yours – should be imposed by force by the state?

The free market will reveal if there is genuine demand for this information and, just as importantly, how much people are prepared to pay for it. Given that you people are talking about threatening supermarkets with state violence if they don’t start providing you with this information on the labels, I’d say that there is not a great deal of interest in this issue (because, whilst it’s easy to make all the right noises when responding to opinion polls, the free market makes people put their money where their mouth is).

I think it fair to say that profit-driven supermarkets have a far better idea of what people want than either you or I, so we should probably stop with the nonsense about how they are leaving money on the table because they are too scared to innovate.

As I said before, you have a “perfect right” to start your own shop and provide whatever information you wish on the label. And that is where your rights end.

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kahikatea – thanks for the followup! Another wonderful example of how corporate interests, even of companies that are often friendly to New Zealand, can get in the way of what’s best for consumers and producers here.

Mouldwarp – Nobody wants to discriminate about the nationality of a product without a reason. Even “supporting local business” can be a legitimate reason. Globalisation has costs and people have a right to choose in their shopping habits whether they support it or not, even ignoring things like regional health issues, laxer food standards in certain countries, etc… Keep in mind that not all health and safety checks keep unhealthy food out of our supermarkets.

Bluepeter – I find it interesting that you think that businesses will always automatically realise when a better strategy exists and utilise it! Free market theory doesn’t even account for imperfect knowledge or irrationality at all, let alone from producers, so if that’s where you’re getting this idea that if CoOL was good it would already be implemented, I suggest you reconsider. Trying out new strategies can be very risky for businesses, especially ones like supermarkets that already live on slim profit margins. They’re only going to implement a strategy if they’re very sure of it, either from analysis or from repeated consumer pressure.

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http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/04/0080501

What will your kids be eating when the sh!t finally hits the fan?

Slightly off topic but… what the heck

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You might benefit greatly MW, by not making shit up…

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A quick NZ version … just dividing by 300/4 (population) and 0.779302 (currency):

Primary producers – 26666 – develop time 1 day – ongoing 1 hour per month – @ $20 per hour.
total develop $4.1 million + total ongoing $6.2 million = $10.4 million.

Food Handlers (including packers, processors, importers, wholesalers, and distributors) – 1333 – develop time 2 days – ongoing 1 hour per week – @ $40 per hour.
total develop $0.8 million + total ongoing $2.7 million = $3.5 million.

Retailers – 413 – develop time 5 days – ongoing 1 hour per day – @ $50 per hour.
total develop $0.6 million + total ongoing $5.8 million = $6.5 million.

Total Cost: $20 million.

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Also they separate the cost into setup costs and ongoing – set-up costs could be reduced if the ministry responsible provided sample record-keeping systems to businesses. Kinda like for the introduction of STV the dept internal affairs provided vote counting software to all the returning officers.

The complete assumptions in the US study.

Primary producers – 2 million – develop time 1 day – ongoing 1 hour per month – @ $25 per hour.
total develop $400 million + total ongoing $600 million = $1 billion.

Food Handlers (including packers, processors, importers, wholesalers, and distributors) – 100,000 – develop time 2 days – ongoing 1 hour per week – @ $50 per hour.
total develop $80 million + total ongoing $260 million = $340 million.

Retailers – 31,000 – develop time 5 days – ongoing 1 hour per day – @ $50 per hour.
total develop $62 million + total ongoing $565.75 million = $627.75 million.

Annual Reporting and Recordkeeping Burden for the First Year:
Estimated Number of Respondents: 2,131,000.
Total Annual Hours: 59,355,000.
Total Cost: $1,967,750,000.

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Thanks for posting a link to that US cost estimation. The full study is:
http://www.ams.usda.gov/cool/ls0216.htm

AMS estimates that the time required for a producer to develop a recordkeeping system that would meet the requirements of these guidelines to be 1 day. AMS estimates that the ongoing time required generating and maintaining the required records to be approximately 1 hour per month. Although AMS recognizes that many large-scale producers will require substantial more time than these estimates, AMS believes that the overall averages presented here to be accurate. For the purposes of this program, AMS also estimates the hourly rate, or value of time for a producer to be $25 per hour.

Also in that US study they said that 2 million food producers, 100,000 processors and distributors and 31,000 retail stores would be affected and multiplying all those assumptions out they came to a total cost of $2 billion which sounds huge but remember this is the US and.

the admin time necessary is very small, and this cost estimate is based entirely on costing the hourly rate of the people doing the admin, but in the real world it would be staff who are employed already who will be doing the admin which they can easily fit in (an hour a month!) with their other duties. I can’t imagine that any food producer would have to hire extra staff or pay any one more money to do the admin work. So really the $2 billion figure is very unrealistic.

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Anybody remember the ‘Iceland’ effect in the UK over GM food?
Nobody was bothering to offer non-GM food in the UK 10 years ago, there was ‘no demand’. The food chain ‘Iceland’ banned GMOs from their products and doubled their market share in a couple of months. They basically forced all UK supermarkets to ban GMOs in thier own brands. It turned out that consumers really didn’t want ‘mucked about with’ food after all.
Anytime someone says that supermarkets know what their customers want just say “Iceland”.

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If the food is safe then there is no specific information the supermarkets should have to provide.

If you bigots are concerned about the nationality of the growers, their religion, their ethnicity, their sexuality etc, then that is *your* problem. Start your own supermarket and put all the labelling you want on the stuff you sell. That way you can buy only goods made by white Christian heterosexuals in the south island, or whatever it is you choose.

I’m serious. You have the freedom to do this, to open your own supermarket for rednecks.

Yet for some reason you choose not to: you choose instead to impose yet more regulation and cost on the rest of us by forcing other people to supply just the specific extra information that, for whatever reason, interests you.

It’s scary just how quick you people are to reach for the power of the state to impose your wishes on everyone else.

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# Ari Says:
December 8th, 2007 at 6:08 am

“I also see it as very weird that we’ve previously opposed this type of labelling internationally. I’ve often heard offhand comments from overseas friends I met on the internet about how New Zealand exports great food. Seems to me like it could be used as sort of deliberate branding, rather than hurting our interests.”

Fonterra are producing more and more milk outside New Zealand. It may be that they want to use New Zealand for branding purposes, but actually sell dairy products from other countries as well and hopw people assume it’s from New Zealand. In that case, Country of Origin Labelling would lead to them being found out.

Another allegation I’ve heard is that some New Zealand companies are actually selling New Zealand produce as foreign produce to get around import quotas.

Either way, New Zealand companies that oppose country of origin labelling internationally are likely to be trying to fool someone.

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BP

Your assumption that anyone in THIS NZ business does anything new unless a cattle prod is used on their rump is astonishing.

Given that my use of the word had little to do with producers and much to do with the stores in which goods are sold, I am happy to correct the misunderstanding.

NZ producers are rightly proud of the fact of their originating something of value. Getting that fact to the consumer in every instance however, requires a certain amount of determination on the part of the consumer. Stores do not label that well at all (though I observe that P&S is doing better)…. and the market inertia is immense. I want CoOL labeling. Whether it impairs our sales overseas or not. I go out of my way to find NZ made things. I dislike how difficult it can be.

respectfullt BJ

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http://canada.eharvest.com/cool/index.asp

>>manufacturers will easily be able to absorb the costs and will not have to >>pass them onto consumers.

I’m sure they’ll take note of your suggestion. /sarcasm

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“Of course there are costs. Extra process equals extra cost. Did you miss introduction to economics at high school?”

I never said that there would not be additional costs to manufacturers. I said that the additional costs are so miniscule that manufacturers will easily be able to absorb the costs and will not have to pass them onto consumers.

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“Don’t you socialists use big-nasty-capitalist Google? Try harder.”

(1) I’m not a socialist. (2) I don’t consider Google to be nasty capitalists, they are a model of good capitalism since they consider the environment and treat their employees well. (3) You brought the “research” up, so you should link to it. Providing quotes and then patronisingly telling people to Google to find out where they come from is just plain arrogance and rudeness.

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I’m not sure you’re serious, but in case you are, I think the premise that producers won’t compete is ridiculous.

The very reason New Zealand producers are supporting this initiative is they know it will hamper their imported competition by creating a soft trade barrier, backed by marketing campaigns they don’t need to pay for i.e. Buy NZ Made. Xenophobia is rife in this country.

As I’ve said, if people demand labels, they’ll get them. Given the numbers that signed the petition, there is clearly little demand.

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BP

The assumption you missed…

The assumption that someone in this business in New Zealand will lead.

If Woolworth’s brought the Aussie policy to NZ, would more people shop there? I would shop there more than I do now. Even though the store is twice as far away as the P&S. Even though the prices were a bit higher.

The problem BP, is that nobody is doing it therefore NOBODY has a competitive advantage either way, and nobody has an incentive to try it… cause they don’t know who’d get the advantage (if there is one).

This isn’t exactly unheard of… its a stalemate that both side are enjoying because they don’t have to do anything.

We know that successful business tends to abhor changes. They are successful with things as they are, changing risks that. Legislating a change like this takes away the risk. Everyone has to do it, therefore nobody gets an advantage.

Your answer is an assertion that the market will act efficiently. This market however, does not act at all. it does not act to create demand and it does not supply anything “on speculation” except for toys in season. So no demand can be felt… there’s no difference from one store to the next.

respectfully
bj

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Are you saying manufacturers and growers are ignorant? They’re backing this labeling.

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Your argument is that manufacturers know their market and are driven by logic. mmmmmmm.

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