We need a food security strategy
While the rest of the world has faced food riots, plunging world food stocks and out of control prices for basic commodities New Zealand has mostly floated along with our major worry being the rapidly rising price of cheese. So it was good to see the Herald covering Sue Kedgley’s call for a food security strategy:
We must have a strategy to reduce our dependence on imported staple commodities like wheat and corn, and move towards self sufficiency in as many basic staple crops as possible,” Ms Kedgley said.
The assumption is that there will always be enough food, there will always be enough food in New Zealand. But the reality is that we import about half the food we eat, and our reliance on imports is growing by the year.
So the huge upheavals around food in the rest of the world are entirely relevant here too because, even though we should be a ‘food basket’, we don’t have a clear strategy to ensure that we can provide ourselves with the basics we need to feed our people. If we were cut off from the rest of the world the only supplies we would have of some staples would be a few days of supplies on the shelves of supermarkets. Looting anyone?
Photo Credit: Darren131 at Flickr
April 9th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Leave out the word food and you’ll be closer to the mark.
April 9th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
“If we were cut off from the world…”
I see the doomsday fetish is alive and well…
If the worst came to the worst, which wouldn’t happen overnight, we’d reorient production accordingly. We’re rather adaptable creatures…
April 9th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Obviously we can grow fine quality corn in abundance, but quality wheat is another matter. The earlier Canterbury Plains did, as far as I know, best suit the growing of cereal crops.
Sugar we do not have although I recall WW11 stories, from the UK, about growing sugar beet. Rice is another problem. I am not aware of any major trials in growing rice in NZ. I would guess it is not warm enough and even Northland’s rain may not suit the needs of a rice crop.
How many consumers think about the supply of basic commodities when they browse around a supermarket?
It is a subject worthy of discussion and research.
April 9th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
How about someone reviewing works by eg Herman Daly Frog.
April 9th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
GE food is the way to go if it can make it easier to grow.
April 9th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Yeah, why WOULD we suddenly be “cut off from the rest of the world”??
April 9th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Not cut off in the sense of no boats or planes coming or going, just in the sense of other countries not selling us their food because they have decided, in a global food shortage, to feed their own people first. Which is exactly the problem the Philippines and other nations are facing. For instance this from Bloomberg:
April 9th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
One problem is that we don’t know the carrying capacity of NZ.
If developed countries faced serious problems we would most likely see the return of most of our ex-pats. We would also probably see a few more refugees.
Because we don’t know the carrying capacity, we don’t know when we would have to stop accepting people.
If we were cut off I would assume that would also mean imported fertiliser would stop coming in so our crops would not grow as good as they do now.
It would also mean our exported food would not get to countries that rely on it, putting pressure on other food exporters.
Because of globalisation, I would assume that if one agricultural country has a bad enough year and can’t produce, then that would put a strain on other agricultural exporters as they would increase production to cash in on the extra demand. The extra strain might collapse some of them too and at some stage the whole lot could come down.
Would countrys like America, China or India just sit back and let their people die off to a sustainable population?
April 9th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Joy, rice is grown in Korea and northern and northeast China, which are much colder than New Zealand.
Also, not long after SARS, when bird flu was the big scare, the NZ government did threaten to lock down the country should H5N1 turn into a human pandemic. Being cut off from the rest of the world is not such a remote possibility.
April 10th, 2008 at 3:49 am
We need a food security strategy? Maybe. But will the political process produce one that’s worth having? If the development of the road safety strategy is in any way typical then I wouldn’t hold out much hope.
The process of developing the road safety strategy began in 2000 with a consultation document from the Natioal Road Safety Committee which explained how the road toll could be reduced to less than 200 in 2010. But readers were then told they could only chose one of the two options, effectively limiting the reduction to 300 deaths in 2010. The benefit cost analysis for the two options were vague and incomplete, as if the intention was to guide the public to a preselected option, which the public duly indicated their preference for. By the time Cabinet had approved a strategy in 2003 they had already taken fiscal decisions that undermined the strategy. If it hadn’t been for fuel price shock reducing recreational driving, particularly amongst youth, the road toll would still be close to 500 deaths a year. The actual road toll is double what the NRSC said was possible by 2010.
Your food security strategy will probably go the same way. All mouth and no trousers.
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001381.php
April 10th, 2008 at 9:10 am
“While the rest of the world has faced food riots”
Hmmm, just the one small Caribbean nation in the linked article, hardly very significant in global terms. The food situation in for example Zimbabwe would be orders of magnitude more serious, but I guess that can’t be spun to support whatever point you’re trying to make.
“out of control prices for basic commodities New Zealand”
This is a bit of an overstatement, to say the least. Yes, prices of various staple products have gone up quite a bit but they’re hardly out of control. A quote of the food price inflation for the last year would be a lot more informative that this emotive stuff.
More facts, less spin please. Oh, but I forget that this you’re a political party, so spinning the facts to suit your arguments is what you have to do. Sorry.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Skeptic, makes me wonder why we should respect your opinion in future when you don’t even mention the fifth paragraph:
The chief of the FAO mentions Cameroon and Burkina Faso http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=2&theme=&usrsess=1&id=1 98744
The Telegraph mentions riots in Mauritania and Mozambique, with protests in Uzbekistan, Yemen, Bolivia and Indonesia http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/09/wriots 109.xml
The Guardian mentions riots in West Bengal and Mexico http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange
Theres actually a fairly useful map there http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/2008/04/food_riots.html
Though that obviously does not count as the rest of the world, that’s a little slack of you don’t you think?
April 10th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Your right Skeptic, there do need to be more facts shown.
This is one from America,
From the UK,
From our newest mates in China,
A boring one from Stats New Zealand,
I s’pose we must be doing ok then?
Skeptic is going to show us some more facts to prove that these are just isolated cases though.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
S/He does have a point about “out of control prices for basic commodities New Zealand” not quite being the case. There was this link not long ago though - perhaps frog was referring to dairy as ‘basic commodities’? This is more recent though: Food prices were up 9 per cent in the year to February (http://www.stuff.co.nz/4468514a13.html), which is certainly up there.
http://blog.greens.org.nz/index.php/2008/03/13/cheese-prices-up-599/
I really think Skeptic has been very lazy, buy s/he can bludge off our hard work and become enlightened! ‘ray!
April 10th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
One of the reasons for milk going up is because farmers have had to buy in feed from the US. The feed has gone up quite a bit because the increased production of biofuels is competing for the same land that is used for stock feed.
April 11th, 2008 at 3:25 am
Dairy farmers buying feed from the US. Why? Not by any chance because all those new dairy farms in Canterbury used to be grain farms? What a delicious irony
April 11th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
I just found this little article.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/immigr/populate.htm
This little quote from the article makes me think that little old NZ could probably have the best chance out of all the other developed countries to not be effected by a global food security crisis.
The problem is that it is easier to understand after it’s too late.
Hey Frog, why don’t you ask Jeanette if she would be open to the idea of bringing this up in parliament like I asked her before?
She understands the problem, she even pointed out that the Values Party understod the problem back in the 70’s too.
If you get bored at smoko time how about bringing up the subject of the carrying capacity of NZ, and ask the other Green MP’s if they think it might be a good idea to do some research on it?
If it’s not a good time to look into it, could you ask them when a good time might be?
Tell them if they start getting the ball rolling I’ll promise give them my vote in the election.
April 11th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Carrying capacity? ‘many many millions more than will ever live here in the next 50 years’?
April 11th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Carry capacity of New Zealand?
The UK has a similar landmass, and the population is 60 million. Let’s chop that figure by two thirds, just so people don’t start complaining about UK sustainability issues, and that’s still 20 million.
To get any emptier than this, you’d need to move to Antarctica.
April 11th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Actually did you mean ‘carrying capacity independent of imports’ DougT? Cos then im not sure the UK does have a carrying capacity of 60 million.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Yeah, I just ment what the country produces itself. And I’m just talking about food too.
The UK depends alot on imported food which is why they are a bit worried about what might happen if there is another major war.
Saying that we are way under 60 million does not take into account the fact that our main export is agricultural, which means that we have to stay way under our carrying capacity to export more food than we import.
I think the free trade deal was one of China’s ways of getting our tit in their mouth, so we possibly have a bigger obligation now to help feed them too.