In this issue with Fonterra, Winston is 100% right
Last week Winston Peters called me a ‘fat retard’ on Sean Plunkett’s culture war hate platform – that’s the Foreign Minister of NZ ladies and gentlemen, so I have zero time for this Culture War Boomer who traffics in bile and malice.
He’s like an octogenarian on viagra, an old prick no one wants.
But in this issue on Fonterra, he is 100% right…
Winston pleads to farmers not to let Fonterra sell off Anchor, Mainland, Kapiti brands to French
The NZ First leader has written an open letter to Fonterra farmers who are about to vote on whether to sell iconic brands to a French dairy giant. Peters urges them not to focus on the ‘short-term sugar hit’ and that for $4b, they are giving it away.
…Winston has been reading The Daily Blog!
As TDB has been pointing out for sometime now…
Fonterra’s $4.22 billion sale to Lactalis raises long-term concerns, professor says
A leading agriculture professor is warning about potential risks from Fonterra’s billion-dollar sell-off of its consumer brands.
Last month, Fonterra announced the sale of its consumer businesses, including brands Mainland and Anchor, to French company Lactalis for $4.22 billion.
While the sale will see farmers get a cash boost with a tax-free return of $2 per share, academics fear Fonterra is losing its value-add capacity.
Alan Renwick, an agriculture and economics professor at value-adding, said the salewill create problems in the long run.
“They’re getting a very good price [but] we are giving up something for this money, and that is the value-adding part of the business, the consumer side.
“We do need to consider what we’re giving up, these future earnings and value added that those brands, the policy now will be to focus down on their ingredients and food service.
“So, we’re putting our eggs in one basket and moving away from having a more diversified business.”
…’Value added productivity’ is a myth, welcome to Basic Bitch NuZilind!
We keep getting told we feed 40million, but that 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 vast majority of our export dairy is milk powder used as an ingredient filler in the heavily processed food manufacturing industry, all that value added grift was to sell our green credentials, but the Dairy Industry is so polluting that they’ve decided it’s easier and less political fall out if it dumps the pretence of environmentalism and just produces mass milk powder for food so drenched in fat and sugar that unsustainable dairy is the least of their sins.
Fitch Ratings analysts warned NZ this year that the next 10 years of economic growth was dangerously stunted.
This matters because it is ratings analysts like Fitch who warn the market if we are good for all the money we borrowed.
They base that on future projections of our economic cycle and their analysis is terrible.
Fitch have made clear to us that Dairy, Tourism and exports to China have waned and can not grow beyond the manner in which we have already grown them.
Regressing back into being a base ingredient producer with no added value be it milk powder, live cow exports or raw logs, is not a solution.
Good to see Winnie is reading TDB.
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Precison fermentation will make most of our cows udders redundant. So to sell off the consumer brands is shortsighted madness. The FMC brands will be all that is left once the fermentation technology is established.
These same farmers will come crying to the government begging for our tax dollars to bail out their polluting industries.
The old dickhead could do better by not lying about the contractual arrangement. But he can’t help himself.
And note how he reckons Fonterra MUST front up to the media?
That sounds a lot like some sort of State mandated media control, the very issue he was losing his shit over last week.
And his voting base are so mentally aberrant they don’t notice the double standards.
Peters is also right to point out that ‘Star of David’ Seymour is wrong to say Parliamentarians should butt out, completely ignoring the legislation that has allowed Fonterra monopoly status.
The brands have no major exposure in the international market and as such are only worth what they can be sold for.
The development of the brands into international best sellers requires a huge investment into marketing and distribution.
I don think Fonterra or their shareholders have the financial muscle to set up the sales, marketing, distribution, stock piling of products (shipped from the bottom of the world), etc. to make the brands viable.
Unless people want the State to front up with the cash?
And if the State does, the opposition they will face from international players can be immense and require years upon years of risky investment. Maybe even a WTO inspection?
The State, Fonterra and their shareholding is between a rock and a hard place. Spend money they don’t have in a risky distribution of consumer products (over maybe 30 years or more to gain market share) or take the money and supply contracts.
Easy to say spend the money but it is not a quick injection of once only funding. This is a long term sinkhole.
As Melanie sang. “ You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”
The real reason the blokes from down on the farm want to flog the family jewels is that they’ve realised that the continual trashing of our environment and our attitude to the Paris Accords is resulting in the gradual realisation by our offshore consumers that our clean green pastures are nothing more than copy writers horseshit. The reality being that we’re actually a methane spewing, water polluting, nitrogen poisoned dung heap.
From our dairy brands perspective Cadbury and palm oil come to mind.
Does Warren Buffet run maize corn syrup producers? No, he owns the value added Coca Cola brand. Smart money owns the brand and the production. Winston’s smart.
Last year my wife and I were in Northern China and visited her Uncle in Inner Mongolia.
Seven years ago he kept ten dairy cows( bred from New Zealand embryos). He uses a Waikato Milking System.
Now he has forty cows. He produces clean, pasteurised milk for local consumption in Baotou City. Many of his neighbours have diversified to dairy production because it pays better than crop farming.
Shortly Uncle will retire and his son will take over. Nephew told me he would like to keep expanding the herd He was aghast when I told him the way our farmers dump bull calves as bobby calves – they keep all their calves, fatten bull calves and sell them as yearlings. The beef is a useful secondary income.
I use this as an example to show how as China’s domestic dairy production rises they will have less demand for imported milk powder so there is no point in increasing the pollution of waterways and degradation of land to produce more low value exports.
Fonterra was only allowed to form, against great concern and protest, when they insisted it was just an export company and would not affect local supply or prices. Open knowledge, in the damned paper.
I remember. Every supposed leader and media, however, were born yesterday. It is why corporates win over and over, and things get worse and we can not have nice stuff.