Dairy and trade
Your simplistic plea for free trade (Editorial, June 14) was a shock. To suggest that the poor countries can trade their way to full stomachs through the international markets that destroyed their sustainable agricultural capacity and infrastructure in the first place is a joke.
Your notion that producing meat and dairy products is something that New Zealand does “best” is obsolescent. If dairying means importing half a million tonnes of palm-oil cake a year, itself produced by displacing a million hectares of tropical rainforest, wasting half our water consumption on farm irrigation, and polluting rivers in the process, we could well be the world’s worst.
To select our industries on the naive formula of comparative advantage is nonsensical if taken to the extreme, as you suggest, of neglecting those we do not do well. That way lies loss of manufacturing, failure to develop weaker industries, loss of diversity and new opportunities, and dogmatism about what “best” means in a changing world.
Ricardo’s classic theory of comparative advantage was outdated first by the free international flow of capital, and more recently by the threat of climate change. With 90% of international trade being either raw materials or two-way traffic of identical items, we should address that huge waste of energy and lost domestic economic vitality, not add to it.
The current free-trade mantra conveniently overlooks the above facts, as well as over-consumption, needless packaging, the proliferation of unproductive or exploitative middle merchants, escalating biosecurity and health problems, deteriorating variety and quality of work, and a loss of robustness in the face of natural or financial disasters.
One part of your editorial rings true: allow people to help themselves.
Gavin Maclean (Gisborne)
We have a woeful history in this country of industry leaving messes to be cleaned up by future generations at the expense of the taxpayer or ratepayer. Numerous toxic sites around the country left by agrichemicals, timber processing and mining create an ongoing threat to health and the environment that are difficult, expensive and sometimes impossible to clean up.
It would be interesting to see triple-bottom-line accounting applied to the New Zealand dairy industry to discover the true cost of production to the country. Fonterra managing director Peter McClure claims the company already subsidises the domestic market by at least $15 million a year, and Federated Farmers’ Charlie Pedersen says it is not up to the dairy sector to subsidise the cost of dairy products to the consumer. That could well be a valid position if the dairy sector was meeting its true costs of production, but this industry is enjoying its high profit status at the expense of the New Zealand population and not just in how much we are having to pay for their products.
The dairy industry offloads its true production costs to the general public and environment:
n Effluent and fertiliser runoff from farms into our waterways creates algal blooms and in some cases smothers lakes.
n One Fonterra factory has had its resource consent renewed allowing it to discharge 8500 cubic metres per second of untreated wastewater per day directly into the Manawatu River.
n In the Emissions Trading scheme, the agriculture sector will be exempt from meeting its commitments until 2013, signalling yet another subsidy of the dairy industry by other New Zealanders.
n Unsustainable pressure is being placed on the environment and on scarce water resources as more farms are converted to dairying in increasingly unsuitable regions such as the Canterbury Plains.
Fonterra’s overseas customers’ purchase price of a carton of milk is their only cost for the product they buy. So if Fonterra and the dairy industry think New Zealanders should pay international rates for their products, then they should also be willing to meet true costs of production instead of expecting their local consumers to pay several times for their goods, for years to come.
Paul Kerr (Punakaiki)
BARACK OBAMA
As a former resident of Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC, I wonder why you insist, as do most Kiwis and Americans, on defining Barack Obama as black American. As Jon Johansson said, he’s “an exotic cocktail of black African [Kenyan] and white Kansan stock” with a largely Indonesian background. That’s good but I’d call that international, not just American black. A bit like Tiger Woods, one quarter black, or that fine Jamaican Colin Powell.
Obama’s splendid wife, Michelle, is genuine black American, like Condoleezza Rice, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr and many more. But why label Barack that way? It’s his mixed race background that makes him special.
Graeme Thompson (Levin)
BLOOD DONORS
Bloody shame indeed that, despite New Zealand being short of donors, my partner and I are unable to donate (“Bloody shame”, June 7). We have lived in New Zealand for 15 years and were regular donors in the UK, but despite being committed vegetarians for 30 years and not having touched meat products during that time (let alone mad-cow products), our blood is not wanted.
I imagine that many potential donors have visited the UK in the past 20 years for six months or more and so their blood isn’t wanted either.
A quote from NZ Blood Donors website: “You must not have lived in the United Kingdom, France or the Republic of Ireland between 1980 and 1996 for a cumulative six months or more.”
Presumably it’s OK to have gorged yourself on contaminated meat if it was for less than six months.
Ruth Buss (Napier)
JURY VERDICTS
The vitriolic anti-police letter from Peter Tashkoff (Letters, June 7) is sadly typical of increasing attacks on the police force recently. Do the individuals who constitute our only defence against the criminal element in our midst really deserve these media-enabled attacks?
On the grounds of competence, some do. And over the years a number of officers have been convicted of serious crimes and quite properly imprisoned.
But this reflects the society we have built over the years. Equally heinous crimes have been committed from time to time by teachers, politicians, journalists, lawyers, accountants and other usually upright and honest pillars of society.
Not-guilty verdicts in recent high-profile murder cases have brought further criticism on the heads of the investigating officers, not just from those who clearly have no idea of how the justice/jury system works in this country or who may have fallen foul of the law but also from lawyers who should know better.
The fact is we have not only an adversarial criminal system that generally works in favour of the accused, and for historically good reasons is designed to, but one in which the object of a trial is not to establish the truth, but to establish whether, on the basis of admissible evidence, the accused can be found guilty beyond all reasonable doubt, which is a vastly different thing.
A defended trial can be pure theatre. Although police incompetence may be a factor in some cases, juries, denied information, sometimes get it wrong. For example, a man charged with murder or rape may have recent and relevant previous convictions for similar crimes but this cannot be revealed to the jury.
It is possible that sometimes the police get it right but juries get it wrong. And what are police to do when there are no witnesses and those who know what happened refuse to tell the truth and are advised by their lawyers to stay silent?
The amazing thing is that so many bright, able and honest young people from solid New Zealand backgrounds still think the job is worthwhile. Long may they do so because if ever they did not, we would be at the mercy of the bad eggs out there.
Peter Eyers-Hill (Little River, Banks Peninsula)
THEATRE
Hamish Keith repeats the popular heritage mantra that Pacer Kerridge’s demolition of His Majesty’s Theatre was a major conservation crime (The cultural curmudgeon, May 31).
At the risk of eternal banishment from the conservation world, I dare to suggest that executive chairman David Phillips unwittingly and inadvertently did Auckland a favour. To “do up” His Majesty’s to an acceptable standard for today would have been totally uneconomic.
The theatre’s sole redeeming feature was its auditorium. It was a major earthquake hazard, the stage was too small, the site was too small, the backstage facilities were either nonexistent or repellent, and there were no foyers – unless you count that windy arcade that we used to camp out in, in our sleeping bags, when waiting for the box office to open. And the arcade was a huge fire trap.
Auckland’s suffering ratepayers have already paid over $60 million to fix the Town Hall and the Civic Theatre. And, as Keith notes, someone will have to find comparable money for the St James. The seismic upgrade of antique brick masonry structures is a daunting and expensive business, as North Shore City is about to find out with the Victoria Cinema in Devonport. Phillips saved us having to agonise for long over His Majesty’s.
Denys Oldham (Devonport, North Shore City)
