by frog
The Greens have put the politics of food front and centre of their election campaign yesterday with Jeanette launching a food revolution.
I’m recruiting a democratic coalition of the willing for our revolution. Our revolution is not a violent one with guns and tanks. Nor is it a falsely stereotypical one of hippies and activists. Our coalition will not come from the Ureweras. Although all those people are welcome. It is an army of young mothers and older grandmothers – and yes, men are allowed too – who will demand the right to know what is in the food they feed their children. It is an army of families declaring food democracy by lobbying for their school to grow and serve fresh local foods. It is a willing coalition of farmers that are going to remove the oil and carbon emissions from our food chain. It is a coalition of chefs who will stock their restaurants, cafes and tearooms with food from local farmers. It is grandparents, uncles and aunties handing down to new generations home made scone recipes. It is people, citizens, demanding food policy is no longer primarily about trading, but about eating well.
Her speech included a challenge to Fonterra that much of the media picked up on:
if there is one thing we can produce efficiently here, it is milk. In fact, we produce so much that we can use only 4% of it here and the rest is exported… The fact is that a major driver of milk and cheese prices here is our link into the global markets. Families on low wages here have to compete with the wealthiest commodity traders and speculators of much larger countries to afford a product grown just along the road.
Today I want to issue a challenge to Fonterra. Show us you are a good kiwi company. Give something back to the country that has provided you with a great climate, cheap energy and hard working farmers that have allowed you to become so successful. Sell your products in NZ at a price that our people can afford. You make so much on your exports, you can afford to make less profit on the 4% you sell here. We are all New Zealanders, in this together. The PR benefits to you would be enormous, the cost very little. You would earn the respect of us all.
Published in Campaign | Environment & Resource Management | Health & Wellbeing by frog on Sun, June 1st, 2008
Tags: Annual Meeting, Fonterra, Food, Frog, frogblog, green party, greens, Jeanette Fitzsimons, new zealand, revolution
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Wow. Now that I like.
Starting a discussion around healthy food, local food, supply & availability.
I would much rather see blog/chat about food, water resources, the diversity of food production in NZ and the security of our food supply than a whinge about tax cuts.
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do we all shift to the westside of the country as the east is gona be a wasteland?
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i grew up in the seventies and yep can’t say i liked it but yeah we were more self sufficient.
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we should tap waiheke’s virtually untouched natural reserve of water though i don’t know what the impact of it will be to the island i’m sure they have enough money to keep them going for a long time
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Count me in. I’m already building a community with a group of people in order to grow our own food and buy and barter locally. You have absolutely no idea how cheap that is. We even have local dairy farmers who are happy to supply us with milk outside of Fonterra and we are learning to make our own cheeses, hams and sausages. Relearn the old skills and feel rich, strong and above all independent from the international corporations. And no I don’t believe in giving all the trappings of the modern world so I still have a dishwasher and a washing machine oh and even a bread machine.
But I eat organic locally produced food and with our food cooperative we save on carbon emission’s by ordering our food that we can’t produce locally in bulk.
We’re even experimenting which grain will grow best here locally so we get that independence back as well.
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“..remove the oil and carbon emissions from our food chain..”
er..so what are you going to replace those energy sources with?
Horse perhaps? Ox maybe?
Starve the developing world and use biofuels?
I’m afraid “..aunties handing down to new generations home made scone recipes” isn’t going to cut the mustard!
P.S Fonterra is a good kiwi company. They have generated through personal risk and hard work tens of millions of dollars in taxation for the govt to spend on health, education and welfare and brought new employment and new hope to many rural area’s and countless small towns.
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Must be a lot of effort travellerev, well done.
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What’s worse, meaningless incompetent fools milking a political system or the price of milk?
I grow garlic and many erbs.
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d4j, Meaningless incompetent fools milking a political system is obviously worse because ultimately it the root cause of the price of milk.
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the Fonterra man said that he couldn’t figure where the greens were coming from they: “don’t seem to understand economics” and it is the governments job to redistribute income/wealth.
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Yeah, jh, it may be.
But Fonterra is a a near monopoly in the NZ market. And the price of milk domestically is set not according to a reasonable mark-up on the cost of production, but on what Fonterra can sell milk for overseas.
What Jeanette was suggesting was that maybe Fonterra should recognise that as a monopoly supplier, it needs to show some goodwill to the people of New Zealand, some of whom are struggling to with current dairy prices.
The alternative is to regulate the price of dairy products. Personally, I don’t have a problem with regulation when there is a monopoly supplier and no competition in the market, but I knowthere are those usual suspects on this blog who try to maintain the Greens want to regulate everything.
Well done Jeanette, for suggeting a voluntary option to Fonterra. Failing that, I think a regulatory option may need to come into play.
Or maybe we need to look at a Telecom-style unbundling exercise. It is simply unacceptable that monopolies can charge whatever they please because they have no competition.
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d4j said: … meaningless incompetent fools…
Are you sure you are not self-diagnosing, d4j? I haven’t seen a post from you yet on this blog that has a reasoned argument based on facts, rather that abusive rhetoric with no evidential foundation.
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Monopolies have no interest in people or morality; profit is their only motive.
Only legislation will stop their exploitation of the consumer.
They play the percentage game while children go without basic nourishment.
History is strewn with like examples.
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Hmmm a food revolution eh?
One question
How many millions of starving African will that cost?
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jh said: ‘the Fonterra man said that he couldn’t figure where the greens were coming from they: “don’t seem to understand economics? and it is the governments job to redistribute income/wealth.’
I’m sure Jeanette knows very well that asking Fonterra to lower domestic dairy prices will never work; but it’s a great angle to get New Zealanders questioning the rubbish they are fed about economics.
Of course everyone will say the Greens don’t understand economics, but the Greens are the only party acknowledging one of our fundamental economic problems- we don’t have real competition in our markets.
Our neo-classical economic hegemony rests on the idea that markets, left to themselves, maximise economic surplus- the good old ‘invisible hand’ theory. But the invisible hand does not work unless markets are highly competitive.
Fueled by growing profits (which aren’t supposed to exist in the invisible hand – they don’t tell you that in the media! ), large companies are finding new ways to cheat economics and reduce competition- primarily through marketing and ‘differentiation,’ i.e. the anti-competitive masterstroke that was ‘Flybuys’ and it’s spin-offs.
This is affecting us everywhere now: petrol is controlled by only five companies, and, thanks to Flybuys and Wild Bean coffee, a growing number of people only shop between Shell and BP; independent goods retailers are all but disappearing while Wal-Mart-model stores like The Warehouse and Mitre 10 Mega take over; ALL our dairy farmers work together to maximise profits in an anti-competitive dairy co-operative (not monopoly, that means only one producer); and 94% of the food retail industry is controlled by TWO companies.
The $80K+ income bracket media commentators are too busy trying to use economics to justify tax cuts and get faster broadband to mention that our economy is getting screwed. The major parties are too busy trying not to piss those people off. The rest of us are used to hearing lots of spin abut economics but not understanding any of it. And that’s just the way Fonterra likes it.
Good on the Greens for raising this issue, I just hope it wakes somebody up.
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So people using their own money to buy what they want isn’t democracy? No, it’s people making decisions in little cells to make other people do what they want – the market is democracy is action, millions of people making choices out of their own volition. If you want to advocate local food and food not being about trading then what do you think the NZ economy will be based on then, song?
Statements like this are sheer rubbish “Families on low wages here have to compete with the wealthiest commodity traders and speculators of much larger countries to afford a product grown just along the road.”
Commodity traders don’t buy dairy products to stockpile or take home to the cat, it is sold to consumers (it has no value otherwise). They are competing with other consumers, predominantly in China and India, but I guess you can’t hate them as much as you hate commodity traders with typical Neo-Marxist wealth/success bigotry.
Then you say “Sell your products in NZ at a price that our people can afford. You make so much on your exports” Besides the fact Fonterra pays a mountain of tax, as do dairy farmers, why do you want to encourage consumption of saturated fat?
Fonterra has no statutory monopoly (the old Dairy Board and Milk Board did), that was abolished with the opposition of the Alliance funnily enough. So why not lobby individual farmers? Or buy your own farm and run it at well below profit? Maybe you’d learn it might be better to make a good profit from dairy and use the profit to buy something else, or is it the typical state planner mentality that “you have to fix something” when you don’t understand the consequences of your solution?
Remember, if Fonterra sold dairy products in NZ below market price, the quality would match that.
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I will ask again: What new sources of energy are you going to replace oil and carbon based emissions technology with? What are the Greens proposing as an alternative source of energy to move a tractor, plow and seed drill? What? I’m very curious.
Next, when Ms Fitzsimons refers to Fonterra in future I assume she can at least get one fact right and call it what it is: a co-operative, it is not a company. Its understandable she did that, I did it myself in an earlier post here, but I’m not a party leader making a public speech so really, she should get her facts right.
Finally speaking of facts, Fonterra is as you say a near monopoly in the NZ milk market. However Westland Milk, Gisborne Milk Co-operative and Tatua Co-operative Dairy company among others all happily continue to trade in the NZ domestic market independent of Fonterra. Regulating the price of milk could kill them off by destorying their margins, then Fonterra will have a total monopoly, do you really want that?
I am a bit shocked at the level of ignorance Ms Fitzsimons is displaying in her most recent speech. It is a worrying prospect for NZ if the Greens after the next election are in position to influence any future govt. I can only hope they will become much more informed about issues in future.
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StephenR
It actually isn’t all that much hard work. I work half a day on the perma culture farm of friends of mine in order to learn about this way of farming.
I don’t get paid money but I generally take home enough food to last a week for two. I’m not the only one and it is basically a great day out doors with friends.
I spend half a day a week in my own patch and that supplements the food I already earn and it supplies my parents in law with much needed extras on top of their pension. Booze and wine are easy to make yourself and great fun to do. Cheese and stuff is also really easy to make and I still have plenty of time for fulltime activism and it beats working for a boss hands down. My husband has a job he loves and that provides us with enough money for things like rent and energy. We live a millionaire lifestyle on a shoestring.
You just have to break away from the money idea.
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If you’ve asked before I haven’t seen it.
The answer to your power source is ultimately (has always ultimately been) the sun. Transforming energy into the sort of energy dense storage that can be used to run a Tractor or a Fire Engine or a Helicopter or a Ship is an understood requirement that an awful lot of people seem to purposely misunderstand.
First: The ONLY requirement greens put on these things is that they be sustainable. We aren’t aiming to put everyone out of business… we are aiming at making business and social models that can work for the next thousand years.
Second: Despite opposition to using Bio-fuels for general transport the Greens don’t want to forbid their use. There are a couple of possibilities but most result in a bio-diesel. The other possibilities are to run a methane-centric system or to use broadcast power locally. That last one is not as easy to implement. Another Nikolai Tesla is needed. Whatever is used it has to pull as hard as the Diesel does. It also has to be cheap enough that we can afford to buy the resulting produce.
Hopefully this answers this question for you. The point to the answer is that whatever else we do, we CANNOT count on pumping the magic liquid fuel out of the ground anymore. If we burn it, we very likely have to capture the carbon and hydrogen make it in the first place, and finally it will likely take more energy in terms of solar input, to create it than we can afford as a GENERAL solution. The solutions for emergency and industrial and farming vehicles may be different than the answers for the general public.
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The prices are set by Fonterra and the international market, not by Westland, Gisborne and Tatua… or are you arguing that this is not the case? The idea that we who live next to the dairy need to pay the same as the folks who live half a world away is suspect. I’m not sure what the margins are for those three, but I’d be surprised if they were on the brink of bankruptcy. Could they get more market share by lowering prices? Perhaps… but could they sell more milk than they have? No. The prices aren’t running according to “free market” rules. It isn’t a pure monopoly either… but a kilo of swiss cheese is more expensive than a kilo of steak.. and that tells us that something is odd about either the cheese or the market.
Maybe you can explain that one to me when we are exporting the stuff AND a good deli swiss sells for 1/2 the price in the USA… $5.50/lb or $12.10/kilo which at 0.78 is $15/kilo NZ. Heck… that’s when you can FIND a Swiss cheese. When I first arrived here 5 years ago I noticed the absurdity. The NZ Swiss in a store in the US was easier to find AND cost me less than the same product here.
My only explanation is that real New Zealanders only eat Colby.
OTOH, there’d surely be an international ruction over any interference in the price of milk here that did not reflect the price to everyone else on the planet. Enter the WTO and more trouble. If a grass-roots group organizes things, that’s a bit different but I am certain that Jeanette knows the idea will go nowhere even as it stirs up the economic debate.
Usually people who come to tell us of our ignorance neither listen nor understand our answers. You seem to be listening at least and I’m reckoning you do understand some of what we’re about.
The market has to have price signals to function. With respect to carbon there are NO price signals. We are rather insistent that they be put in place. We EXPECT that some things will get more expensive as those price signals go into play and we EXPECT that people will change their consumption and business behaviour as a result. That is not a bad thing it is what we actually are aiming for and complaining that this is what might happen is likely to encourage us. The result aimed at is a more efficient, more self-sufficient and fairer economy. Hard work still to be rewarded. Thrift not to be penalized.
We probably have more in common than you realize.
respectfully
BJ
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travellerev
…and find a nearby permaculture farm! Ah well, pots on the deck will do for now.
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“What are the Greens proposing as an alternative source of energy to move a tractor, plow and seed drill?”
They seem to be advocating the same alternative source of energy that replaced the petrol powered milking machines of the 1920s and that powers the modern mega-irrigator’s.
The prodigious torque of an electric motor is a fearsome rival to the compression ignition engine. The small area that tractors and harvesters operate in simplifies refuelling infrastructure. Unlike a light duty spark ignition engine, the mass of a commercial diesel engine is comparable to an efficient regenerative braking/electric propulsion system.
Cost and commercialization are the only areas left to tackle.
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Off Topic
Is it true that the Greens are supporting CPAG in its efforts to have the working for families benefit paid to the unemployed?
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As a ball park i would have thought that reducing carbon was a (as quick as possible but) long term goal, but first we should stop wasting it (driving the SUV to buy potato crisps etc) and lastly replace it on farms etc.
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BB, at risk of dragging posters off topic like you have, YES!
The In-Work Tax Credit component of Working for Families is discriminatory, because it is available to support children whose parent(s) are working, but not to children whose parent(s) are not working.
This can be for reason of inability to find a job, inability to work because of illness or impairment, or because they are raising young children, for whom the other parent (usually a deadbeat dad) takes no responsibility for his children, and the custodial parent chooses, in the interests of their childrens’ upbringing, to not work in paid employment.
Okay, short answer, please no reply BB or others, lets get back on topic! Unless frog wants to start a thread on this???
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Toad
I know you did not want a reply but I simply have to say that I think that is
outrageous.
The working for families package is bad enough but to think that you now want me to pay for the kids of people who are to bloody lazy to work is unbelievable.
Right..as you were people, please keep on topic.
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Bit silly playing the nationalist card – is Jeanette saying Fonterra should cut cheese prices and thus pay less to ‘kiwi’ farmers, or less to ‘kiwi’ directors or less tax to the ‘kiwi’ government, or someplace else?
By the way, if Jeanette cares to take a look at what’s actually happening in the Ureweras, she might find that there’s an awful lot of people there who have been doing just what she’s proposing for years – living on local foods, trading locally, handing down the recipes etc. etc. Her ‘revolution’ just might’ve started there.
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bjchip:
Yes, you have given some answers to my energy source question thanks. It was good to see your statement “Whatever is used it has to pull as hard as the Diesel does. It also has to be cheap enough that we can afford to buy the resulting produce.?
It won’t make me vote Green of course but it was an acknowledgement of reality that was good to see anyway.
I’m not an engineer but I think much of the technology your proposing will take many years and a lot more research before it is able to met the same power and performance that diesel provides. Oil will have to be relied on as a fuel for motive power for many years to come. Whatever energy source is eventually adopted it must be a voluntary decision, based on sound market principles E.g. the alternative source has become cheaper than oil based fuels, not because govt has banned or taxed out of use, or in some way restricted the use of oil based products. Present oil costs are mostly caused by political instability , Saudi and Venezuelan greed and man made disruptions to supply in Iraq and Nigeria but it would be wonderful to be free of such concerns and onerous import costs. It’s just not practical for many years to come. Govt’s can’t force the technology or alternative fuel to suddenly exist.
I would also say that the only business or social model that will last for the next thousand years is capitalist democracy.
Prices are set by what the market is prepared to pay, not Fonterra. The market is the world, not just NZ. Some of the most expensive fuel in the world can be found in Iran, one of the words biggest oil producers, some of the cheapest can be found in Saudi also one of the worlds biggest oil producers. The difference is the Saudi’s subsidize their oil, the Iranians don’t as far as I know. The Iranians need as much foreign exchange as they can get to pay for imports to improve their standard of living so they export as much as possible.
In effect by demanding cheaper diary in NZ, your asking for either Fonterra or the state to subsidize milk prices. If prices are instead regulated then Fonterra might decide to reduce its liquid milk sales in NZ altogether, this would make a gap available for small producers but they are too small to fill it and because the price is govt set they couldn’t raise their price despite high demand. This means they would find it very difficult attracting new farmer suppliers to met demand who would be getting better returns from Fonterra export revenue, thus supply although low in price would never be enough in NZ. Imagine milk having to be rationed in response.
I regard to your Colby question, I would speculate more people in NZ do eat more standard blocks of Colby than Swiss cheese. Market perception may have something to do with the price difference. Swiss cheese in NZ being considered and priced as an unusual or luxury product, but in the US not so much maybe.
Cheers (and tables).
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Is it a good idea to subsidise food (which is what making Fonterra sell milk cheaper for local consumption than export amounts to) when we have such high rates of obesity and related illness.
Wouldn’t it be better for people to eat less, drive less and walk more?
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Is milk bad? It naturally delivers a lot of important nutrients, with a low fat content (anywhere up to a whopping 3 percent), but is still quite a lot more expensive than coke!
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Oh dear,
shall we close our borders, have a five year plan, and operate in a communal environment that replicates that of some religious sects that have yet to acknowledge transport capability beyond yacht, horse and bicycle.
As soon as we start putting subsidies on anything, we start back down along a track that has cost this country dearly in the past. So I don’t think that’s too good an idea.
Then let’s look at the price of dairy goods in a reasonable context, and the impact of that on sustainability. In 1992, when I patriated to NZ, I remember buying a kilo of butter from a supermarket for $2.50. Yesterday it cost me $7.50. THat’s a CAIR (compound annual inflation rate) of 7.11%. Higher than the RBNZ’s target, but well within the historic norms of inflation. However, at the end of last year I could buy that same kilo of butter for $3.25, which represented a CAIR of 1.65%. To bring it up to the top of the 0%-3% target range I should have paid $4.01 for it in December last year. What this suggests is that the price of dairy goods (or at least butter) was falling behind ‘normality’ by a long way until recently. If the supply chain was to take a 4% ‘hit’ on current prices, lowering my kilo yesterday to $7.20, there is no doubt that I would have saved 35cents, and lowered the CAIR to 6.83%.
Is this subsidy worth the challenge of our trading partners that we, a country that advocates the elimination of trade barriers are now puttiing subsidies onto our local market.
Is this subsidy worth the loss of thousands of acres currently supporting dairy production for the domestic markets to a more lucrative crop, such as wheat, barley, rape-seed, etc.
Is this subsidy worth the many other consequences of subsidy?
My suggestion is that we look for something far more dramatic in our economic equation than a miserly 4% subsidy that causes vast downside consequence. a 25% increase in productivity, across the entire economy.
In a world where ‘a little bit better’ is not cutting the mustard, we need to grasp at Big Hairy Audacious Goals, (BHAGs) that will enable us to again have a lifestyle that is the envy of the world, as opposed to one that is rapidly approaching that of a third world country. (My wife comes from one of those, and in some ways my in-laws have a much better lifestyle than we do!)
Yes, you can have sustainability, but not at the expense of life-style – so we need to come up with ways to achieve it a LOWER cost than the current capability in all areas of desirable sustainability. THat means a radical rethink, resulting in something that everyone can live with, though not everyone need agree. I doubt we can achieve such a nirvana.
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Milk is good, just ask my grandson!
However, let’s look at the price of water ($2.50 for a 500 ml bottle of H2GO) vs a lire of petrol ($2.00 plus!) and start thinking about the relative value of stuff.
Coke, by comparison to water is cheap at twice the price (there is a manufacturing process that comes before the bottling), petroleum, by the same token, for cost to deliver to the buyer, is surely worth twice the twice. If we had to pay $5.00 per litre, would we have the guts to continue our current approach to life? No way, a redical rethink would be necessary.
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Yeah but we have the choice of getting water out of a tap for stuff-all, whereas we don’t have the choice with dairy products (unless we farmed of course).
Also the Greens don’t seem to be advocating *government* subsidies, just asking the industry to sell for less, there’s a big difference. So we can shelve the 5 year plans for the moment…
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Fonterra is a farmer owned co-op, so for it to voluntary forgo profit on any sort of substantial basis, it would have to have the agreement of the farmers who own it.
I don’t think that’s very likely. If government *made* this happen it’d be just the same as taxing the dairy industry and using the proceeds to subsidise milk.
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rich_d_rich Says:
June 3rd, 2008 at 3:53 pm
> I don’t think that’s very likely. If government *made* this happen it’d be just the same as taxing the dairy industry and using the proceeds to subsidise milk.
the same in principle, but administratively more efficient.
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Richard Hurst, You might find that a google search for hybrid tractor, hybrid excavator, hybrid bulldozer or hybrid truck will reveal a surprising amount progress has been made in moving towards less oil dependence for serious work vehicles.
Hybrid technology is particularly well suited to big vehicles as evidenced by it’s use on locomotives and the mega dumptrucks used in opencast mines and hydro dam construction.
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More carefully, Fonterra is the conduit through which global prices are sent to New Zealand.
Here’s the problem.
The world, through bad-planning, poor design and inadequate foresight, is now quite significantly overpopulated with respect to its overall resources. It has been covering the shortfalls by using the cheap energy from oil to pump water, transport food vast distances (even by Air Cargo!!!), fertilize and spray….. New Zealand is at or near carrying capacity. Apply our numbers to the rest of the planet and consider what the resulting carrying capacity of the world actually is…
The point however, has to do with price. If we in NZ kept our numbers down and our farm production up, and the rest of the world is bidding the price of milk and wheat and everything else over the moon, do we export all our food and starve because someone needs the profits or do we feed our people FIRST at a fair profit and sell the excess to the rest of the world for whatever the traffic will bear?
It is a correct statement that the market will set the price. It always does. The invisible hand also kills. That is ALSO a correct statement.
I don’t regard it as sensible to commit collective suicide for the benefit of the few any more than I regard it as sensible to attempt to keep the market from responding to the price at all for the sake of the many. The conflict keeps me entertained however, AND tells me that pure capitalism is as stupid an idea as pure communism… and neither will last as long as a more balanced approach. Sweden does it better.
++++++++++++++=
The general take I have is that for tractors and fire-engines and air travel we will have biofuels of various sources. Hydrocarbons are a beautifully energy dense storage mechanism for energy. The only issue is where we get them from . Methane doesn’t push a diesel well, but it will fire a gas-turbine-electric system with similar or greater grunt. A bio-diesel fuel can go directly into the current engine. Bio-diesel can come from Algae or more conventional farming. See here…
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/07/19/1184559919499.html
I expect the fuel to be more expensive than the current $120/bbl … but it will insulate us from the price shocks in the rest of the world.
respectfully
BJ
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It’s not an either or scenario. The UN Secretary General is right to call for free trade in food.
Sure we need food safety, but we also need abundance of the necessities of life.
If countries which export/trade food simply focus on their local market and then use “spare” land for bio-fuel (even reducing forests to do so in some cases), then we sacrifice the lives of people whose lands will not supply them with sufficient food. And if people migrate as refugees to food surplus nations, the carbon footprint will increase not decrease.
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Why don’t we just take the simple approach and turn our lawns into veggie gardens and start feeding ourselves. Then we won’t have to worry what the Fonterras of the world are up too. A number of investment advisors say that we are at the start of the bull run in agricultural commodites so expect higher prices. And with inflation rearing its ugly head we could be in for a rough ride so setting up the veggie garden could be a good idea. Anyway the way the price of oil is going soon we wont be able to afford to full up the lawn mower
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