The planet burns on a bonfire of farming regulations
Many are rising to the challenges of making all our economic activities climate compatible in ways that also restore our natural environment. But the main bodies in the dairy and meat industries are draggers, rather than drivers, of that vital work, argues Rod Oram.
The Biggest Lie in NZ Politics is that NZ Dairy is the cleanest and greenest in the world when the reality is that it’s a cherry picked nonsense that leaves out pollution so NZ Dairy can get to the numbers to pretend to be clean and green.
Russel Norman’s take down of this Dairy propaganda on The AM Show recently was just ruthless…
“NZ is the biggest seller of a simple commodity called dried milk powder, the cheapest of the cheap, and if you look at what is happening in food production around the world they are looking for more environmentally sound food products.
They are looking for higher value products.
We’ve gone down the pathway of the lowest quality commodity you can produce in the world.
NZ is mid range in terms of its environmental cost per kilogram of milk solids, there is nothing special about it, and we do feed a small number of people compared to the billions on the planet and the economics is very clear that you can be just as profitable if you pull back on the stock rate, pull back on the amount of fertiliser and actually produce a higher product.
Organics is in fact doing incredibly well globally, so why don’t we become a producer of dairy rather than the producer of the cheapest commodity on the planet which results in us trashing our water ways and being big climate producers, that’s a better pathway isn’t it?
…he’s so right!
We always ignore that the 40million number is based on us selling milk powder as a base line ingredient filler for the manufactured food industry. The PR spin pretends it’s wholesome NZ cheese and milk and meat those 40million are eating when the truth is the vast majority of what we export is basic bitch milk powder used as a filler ingredient!
The 3 pillars of NZs economic success:
Alongside our biggest political lie, there are 3 pillars of NZs economic success:
- Stealing Māori land and never paying the true value of that theft back
- Exploitative low wage economy thanks to deunionising the NZ workforce and becoming reliant on exploiting migrant workers
- Rigged Capitalism which IRD showed us allows the richest to avoid taxes.
Theft, exploitation and rigging the system for the rich, those are the 3 pillars that hold up the NZ economy.
Unfortunately for our biggest lie and 3 pillars, there are some grim threats coming.
The Grim Threats:
Dairy sunset industry: The danger, as TDB has been pointing out for years is grant this is a sunset industry and the millisecond those big manufactured food players can make a synthetic dairy ingredient, the entire industry will go belly up…
The dairy industry’s biggest export success may also be the cause of its greatest future concern, as whole milk powder can now be copied and replaced by precision fermentation methods, research shows.
Anna Benny, technical account manager at The Kellogg Rural Leadership Scheme, said in a recent paper that the dairy industry was ripe for disruption because it was over reliant on exports of whole milk powder.
Whole milk powder could be replaced by proteins produced from precision fermentation, that in future would be cheaper and more climate friendly.
…we are economically dependent on an industry that will become a taxi in the age of uber.
There are better ways for us to be advancing dairy but all the industry wants is the cheap option that causes huge pollution and are relying on their political muscle to never have to change.
My bet is that the same shit will keep happening right up until the breaking news headlines that researchers have a synthetic version of our milk powder and the entire country has a share market plunge that is a depression era level meltdown.
And when that happens, oh sweet Jesus won’t the Farmers scream then!
Geopolitical shockwaves: Despite the recent warm welcome from our Economic Overlords in Beijing, alarming new laws China have just passed allowing them to use any powers they see fit to protect the rights of their diaspora sounds like a legal pretext to invade South Pacific nations. Russia is still gambling in the Ukraine and the continuing failure of states left to fend for themselves will cause never ending waves of fleeing refugees. We are no longer in a benign environment and continued global shockwaves will have ongoing ramifications.
Climate Change: Ultimately it is the climate that will determine all and we are seeing spikes in temperatures and climate events that are beyond our capacity to repair in time for the next weather event.
We are seeing this in real time right now in NZ!
The Climate Crisis was some event we feared at the end of the century, what we are seeing is an unleashing of heat events well beyond what we feared…
As climate envoys from the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters prepare to meet next month, temperatures broke June records in the Chinese capital Beijing, and extreme heatwaves have hit the United States.
Parts of North America were some 10C above the seasonal average this month, and smoke from forest fires blanketed Canada and the U.S. East Coast in hazardous haze, with carbon emissions estimated at a record 160 million metric tons.
In India, one of the most climate vulnerable regions, deaths were reported to have spiked as a result of sustained high temperatures, and extreme heat has been recorded in Spain, Iran and Vietnam, raising fears that last year’s deadly summercould become routine.
…there are mega fires burning in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, British Columbia, SIBERIA, Spain and Chile.
All in the past few months.
Siberia holds one and a half trillion tons of carbon and methane in the permafrost, what happens when it burps all that enormous amount of gas into the atmosphere?
We know from the ice record this has happened in the past, 635million year ago and it caused catastrophically abrupt climate change.
We are seeing enormous craters of methane erupting already.
Look what is happening in Turkmenistan…
The US is in negotiations with Turkmenistan over an agreement to plug the central Asian nation’s colossal methane leaks.
Turkmenistan was responsible for 184 “super-emitter” events in which the powerful greenhouse gas was released in 2022, the highest number in the world. One caused climate pollution equivalent to the rate of emissions from 67 million cars.
…singular events that produce the pollution of 67million cars?
What happens when these events get triggered?
There is just no plan to adapt to this new reality when it should be the driving force to begin immediate and radical adaptation for what is coming.
We have no comprehension of what is coming and we are simply not prepared for the age of consequences.
Watching National, ACT and Corporate Farmers use their economic and political muscle to avoid responsibility for what comes next can only be resolved by civil unrest and a campaign of civil disobedience against those interests.
This is the age of consequences.
Just consider how the Corporate Farming Lobby have managed to avoid any tax on their pollution since mid 2004!
They have pushed and pushed and pushed it off for 20 years!
National have already promised ANOTHER 5 year extension which will mean the agricultural industry have managed to stop any tax on their pollution for quarter of a century!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That photo of a National MP driving tractor up the steps of Parliament was a declaration of political war and they have lived up to that declaration.
John Key sold 49% of our Hydro Assets to create a $400million irrigation slush fund that was used to intensify dairy farming while polluting our water and generating climate changing gasses!
The entire economy is forced to bend over backwards for a sunset industry that will crash the millisecond the fast food industry can create a synthetic milk powder!
Claiming that NZs emissions mean nothing in comparison to China and India isn’t a justification to do nothing, it’s an acknowledgement that radical adaptation is the only move left because those Goliath economies have already doomed us to a dangerous climate change future!
We are out of plays and the focus surely must be self sufficiency over trying to eternally trade on a burning planet.
The Left must force a bargain with Farmers for strategically essential reasons.
They are going to feed us when the famine comes.
A recent report on food security found NZ had incredibly low food security because it was so open market driven and refused to subsidise farmers.
Which is where we on the Left must drive the debate.
We should absolutely consider subsidising food grown by NZ farmers and horticulturalists and our seafood and meat and dairy that generates a 15% price reduction for all NZ produce consumed here.
Rebuilding a direct link between the harvest grown here, the people who grow it and a grateful local market who enjoy the product WITH a 15% price reduction.
Climate change will kill global free market supply chains, we are locked into hyper-regionalism. We need to build new economic structures, subsidising NZ kai for the domestic market would lock in certainty for producers while strengthening food security for the population.
We have to find new ways of working together to ensure we can survive what’s coming.
We are a nation of fatherless children raised by angry solo mothers, a low imagination horizon juvenile settler culture built upon stealing indigenous land and polluting it without restraint. A rugged individualism dependent on exploiting a low wage economy and rigging under-regulated capitalism for the rich.
The old greeds, the old hates and the old exploitations will no longer hold the system together if that system is melting in real time.
Super-rich warned of ‘pitchforks and torches’ unless they tackle inequality
Global elite told at London’s Savoy hotel of real risk of ‘civil disruption’ if more is not done to help struggling millions
This is the age of consequences.
They won’t be pleasant.
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Still voting National, better them than this incompetent bunch of useless *****.
Picture has nothing to do with Dairy – might want to look at difference between Dairy and Cattle Farming.
Martyn’s vision of ‘hyper-regionalism’ and short supply chains would mean that the vast majority of goods would need to be locally manufactured. Imports would mainly be raw materials that were impossible to source locally.
The Pentagon has been complaining for years that very long supply chains are a national security risk. It is particularly a problem when the neo-cons are still obsessed with Wolfowitz’s doctrine of forever remaining the sole world superpower. You cannot invade and balkanise China, if you have no other way to produce armaments than to use parts imported from China.
Perhaps the biggest barrier to returning to an advanced, diversified economy — and reviving the high-wage prosperity that came with it — is another kind of war: the propaganda war. The financial establishment have succeeded in ensuring a multi-decade blackout in the press and many parts of the education system, regarding non-globalist theories of development (see Dr. Fred Hirsch’s reports, published by C.F.R. Project 1980s, on his theory of ‘controlled disintegration’).
This censorship is so extreme that barely anyone under the age of 55 is even aware of the previous levels of prosperity, economic development and labour rights that were locally achieved only a few decades ago.
Both involve cattle though…
“Picture has nothing to do with Dairy”
Whoa there precious
Nothing to suggest it does .
Cattle continue to shit in rivers while triggered farmers argue about words.
Utterly imperative that free speech is not censored by the politicians and their bought media hacks.
This has to be a bottom line in making electoral choices, and even then, few parliamentarians are transparent or trustworthy.
Big difference between a herd of 1000 dairy cows shitting in a river after a feed of high input nutrients ( N P and pke) on a 2 ha paddock than a herd of a 1000 beef cows grazing a 1000 ha block, occasionally shitting in a river after grazing a basic rye grass clover mix that might get a dollop of lime or phosphate every so often
The anemic, Lab good Nat bad, posts, that are a staple at ‘The Standard’ draw minimal engagement thought from their readership.
The liveliest comments and debate occur in The Standard’s ‘Open Mike’ sic.
Like this one:
https://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-05-07-2023/#comment-1957988
Milk & Cream at the local vap shop is super expensive. So Fonteara must have some high end product s, not just cheap milk powder.
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