Waatea 5th Estate – Water vs Intensive Farming

4
0

Joining us tonight to discuss the unprecedented mass poisoning of NZers from their drinking water and the role of intensive farming…

In studio – Agricultural spokesperson for Greenpeace – Geniveve Toop

On skype, award winning columnist and intensive farming critic – Rachel Stewart

Environmental Scientist and ecologist with Massey University – Dr Mike Joy

and also joining us tonight on the phone, Green Party Spokesperson on rivers and clean water – Catherine Delahunty

 

 

4 COMMENTS

  1. Really good debate there. I am so thankful that TDB is hosting such an excellent current affairs show, this should be mainstream. Kiwis are gasping for this as they are being starved by John key’s dumb downed not so free view tv.

  2. I’m disgusted by the abusive messages being directed at Rachel Stewart, simply for making use of her basic democratic freedoms of opinion and expression. Business advocates intimidating journalists simply show that they what they want to do to make money is indefensible.

    A tip for anyone experiencing this kind of abuse online (eg on Twitter), learn to take a screenshot with your computer! That way, even if the message is deleted, and the operators of the platform where it was posted won’t help, you have proof of what the message said, and who sent it. Most desktop and laptop keyboards have some kind of ‘screenshot’ or ‘print screen’ or ‘prtscr’ button, and I presume there’s some way to do it on mobiles too.

  3. As rightly been stated by participants, the issues raised are not new, certainly not from a global perspective, and step-by-step environmental degradation became worse everywhere, within the agro-ecology of New Zealand and in nearly all countries and ecosystems of the world.

    The driving force behind the ongoing but culminating destruction is a combination of demographic developments and policies in support to industrialization of production and agricultural products, including mono-cultured food through “business as usual” practices in agriculture, forestry, livestock, fisheries etc.

    This system functions as long as environmental assets and natural resources can be internalized for free or low-cost by commercial interests (sometimes with strong hegemonic characteristics) while, on the other hand, the costs for environmental damages and destruction remain externalized to the wider and increasingly disenfranchised population.

    Farmers, especially small farmers, are simply utilized as “inputs” in this process – not much different to the voiceless workers in a factory or a retailing warehouse, the muted intellectuals in the academic supply chain, or the growing young precariat of New Zealand.

    Most of today’s governance systems – that historically developed as complementary political mechanism to the economics of the industrialization process – have been reduced to social monitoring and shielder of such global (and local) cannibalization economy, following the GDP as a misleading economic indicator.

    In this context it is probably an illusion to assume that the required substantial reversal and adaptation of our production and marketing systems can be organized or led by simply changing the government.

    Coordinated global action with like-minded rural development organizations and agro-ecological science, and re-building of grass-roots response among farmers and food producers must become a focus for the next two decades. The planned, excessive expansion of irrigation systems in New Zealand in the dominant interest of a mono-culture oriented dairy production may very well serve as cross-cutting political platform for such action and response.

Comments are closed.