Dairy sector insights from ANZ...

Interesting report just out from ANZ, their 'Privately-owned Business Barometer' which included Maori dairy sector in their research...

While useful for the insights that a major NZ bank has into an significant part of our economy, I see a positive for the Maori dairy sector (which I am often a little cynical about;) as the ANZ find that 'the level of optimism expressed by farmers about the future of the dairy industry depended on how far into the future they looked' (p. 4). For our Maori dairy operators, many will have a much longer time frame for strategic thinking than Pakeha if the land being farmed is whanau or tribal land.

The report also finds an large number of respondents are incorporating environmental issues into their planning and management:

Unfortunately the report does not disaggregate Maori data from non-Maori (though I'm sure have a steadily growing portfolio of research on us!).

A copy of the report can be found here

Updated with link to Interest.co.nz thread

'One the first day of Xmas my government gave to me, a Maaori ecooooonomyyy'

The latest reports on 'our economy' are out. This one from Kinnect/MPI finds that not only is MPI brilliant at working with (selected) Maori, there remain issues over governance, scale and capability, specifically:

• a need to consolidate multiple owners with small shareholdings into mandated governance entities with effective decision making;
• economic scale to support profitable agribusiness;
• and the capability to grow agribusiness productivity and profitability.

Another report (PriceWaterhouseCoopers/MPI December 2014, same link as above) has some interesting tables on Maori land use and potential for improvement. Note over a quarter of Maori Freehold Land (MFL) is in natural forest and a further 8% in plantation forest. Conversion to dairying remains the sexy beast in the picture... 

The purpose of this report was to confirm the value of additional work into converting and otherwise innovating on Maori land (the original impetus for this came from the BERL reports of 2011 I've posted on before). The Benfit Cost Ratio of 'interventions' are tabulated below, by sector:

A figure below 1 means you technically 'lose' money by intervention.

We can quibble about methodology till the cows come home but dairying remains the go to approach for growing our/the economy (although note horticultures high BCR though against a very low percentage of MFL).

So, business-as-usual.

Given the now confirmed decline of our water quality, including our iconic beaches (remember when iwi/Maori were the risk to these strips of foreshore and seabed?!), there are considerable costs and risks associated with dairy. Further, given the urban character of our rangatahi and the struggle we have with the education system, how to we get our people into secure employment when the trend is less security?

No answers, just more patai.

Meri kirihimete tatou katoa!

Simon Lambert

 

Huihuinga Wahine: Speech by Vicky Robertson at the Maori Women Leadership Summit

A speech from Vicky Robertson, Deputy Chief Executive of Treasurey, reiterates current political-economic discourse on the NZ economy and the place of the Maori economy within NZ Inc.

Robertson (Ngai Tahu) is confident the NZ will ride on the Asian expansion in the medium term but notes our GDP is 15% lower than the OECD average. Further, she highlights the relatively poor indicators for Maori though doesn't unpack this, indeed the salvation seems to lie in greater productivity as reported by MAF a couple of years ago:

• only 20 percent of Maori land was well developed. 
• If the productivity of the remaining 80 percent of that land was brought up to average industry benchmarks it could generate an extra $8 billion in gross output over 10 years
• this equals $11,600 for every Maori living in New Zealand.

The BERL report is of course mentioned - I've posted on this before - but comments that the Maori economy is 'bold, brown and on the move' makes it sound like a healthy bowel movement!

Culture, and our relationship building expertise, is elevated yet again as the advantage we possess as a people. I don't accept that our culture is a necessary and sufficient condition for our development (technically I'd accept culture as an insufficient but necessary conditions that are themselves unnecessary but sufficient, a classic INUS variable) Robertson then goes on to talk about lifting education outcomes for Maori, a necessary piece of the puzzle for individuals and whanau.

All good stuff.

But we're in the midst of a paradox where standing still is going backwards yet our traditions are what make us. Of course we're adaptable - woe betide those Indigenous Peoples who won't change! - but it seems no matter what compromises we make, poverty tracks us like a hungry beast.

And lets not fool ourselves into thinking all Maori can tap into this Maori Economy. We are split along similar lines to Pakeha, with ruling elites and proles.

Sigh.


Anyways, yesterday I went on a tour of Ngai Tahu farms as part of Lincoln University's Whenua Kura programme. Massive scale (I'd argue it's the biggest Indigenous development in the world at the moment) with huge expectations for a) profit, b) employment for tribal members, and c) sustainability.

I'll post on this soon, with pix...

DCD and the 'Sleeping giant' that is/was the Maori economy

But are the dogs running or sleeping?

Me and dogs.

I don't mind dogs. We got a Dalmatian last year, Lila, lovely dog, killed a massive rat in our lounge once.

And I use to fish the Tutaekuri River which ran a few minutes walk from our whare in Kauri Street, Taradale. Dogs can be kai.

looking upstream of Tutaekuri, towards the Otatara pa .

I expect to see at least two guard dogs in every truck yard I pass, like the yard on the corner of Vickerys and Washbourne Roads, back of Sockburn by the old airbase. One of the dogs there - they used Dobermans, Rottweilers, the occasional Alsatian- was three-legged. Dangerous work, if you can get it.

sunrise through the HotDip galvanising plant

the old burger bunker, a wreck before the quake...

Nice.
In Capitalist korero there is the term running dogs of capitalism...which Wikipedia tells me is a "literal translation into English of the Chinese/Korean communist pejorative zǒu gǒu 走狗, meaning lackey or lapdog, an unprincipled person who helps or flatters other, more powerful and often evil people. It is derived from the eagerness with which a dog will respond when called by its owner, even for mere scraps.


I also know to Let sleeping dogs lie, remember the film? I was somewhat stunned by the synopsis:

 Following the break-up of his marriage caused by his wife's affair with another man named Bullen (Mune), "Smith" (Neill) arranges to live on the Coromandel peninsula on an island owned by a Maori tribe. Meanwhile, political tensions escalate as an oil embargo leaves the country in an energy crisis. Tensions boil over into a civil war and guerrilla activity. However, Smith enjoys his peaceful island life and has little interaction with the rest of society.

Well, we all know what happens to Smith. (Actually, I forgot, so I had to look it up.)

What we don't know is what's happening to the 'Sleeping giant' of NZ Inc that is the Maori Economy?

With so much riding on the dairy sector, it poaka-fisted attempts to control korero on its soil management strategies must. give. one. pause. to. think.

I recall Ingrid Collins, chair of Parae Whangara B5 which took out Te Ahuwhenua, saying we/they had reached the limits of intensification, and they're mainly sheep and beef.

Pity the lowlands.

i think this water is looking for the Heathcote...near Tower Junction...

Without wanting to oversimplify, the reason I'm posting on what was an obscure chemical (albeit one developed on the very campus from which this is posted...) is that Rod Oram touches on the risk to our Maori economy, or at least that chunk still on the land. DairyNZ and Fonterra, through supporting/contracting research on technological solutions to the environmental (and hence social and market contexts), are reaching those limits, both limits to the land, the water, their ecosystems, and to people, the hours they can work, the injuries they can carry.

We've seen the invisible hand reaching to the Pacific all those years ago. Now its is grasping, pummeling, clenching, all too desperate, and all too visible if you know where to look.

I think we are seeing the extremities of the logic of accumulating capital. Maori have seen the land squeezed from our hands, the blood wrung out of us as workers but still. it. goes. on.

So this latest corporate fuck up (and perhaps more in the arrogance of the political arm rather than the technocratic) is merely the latest incarnation of capital's logic. More people are aware, more focused questions can be asked, more scrutiny of the answers is possible.

Ain't the end. Ain't even the beginning of the end. But it might be the end of the beginning.

DCP, Eco-N, and milk supply chain management...

As scandals go, it'll probably never reach great heights but for lil' ol' Lincoln campus it is a foot on the ladder.

The product - Eco-N - was developed by Lincoln researchers (led by Prof's Hong Di and Keith Cameron) has been withdrawn by Ravensdown after concerns were raised by foreign markets that the compound around which the IP was wrapped - Dicyandiamide (DCP) - was finding its way into the milk supply.

Staff received an email from the VC's office and links to a couple of press releases, one from Ravensdown (part-owner of the rights to Eco-N) and another from MPI. For MPI, the 'crux' of the issue is the lack of internationally set standards for DCD residues in the food chain: "This is because DCD has not been considered to have any impact on food safety."

Perception, of course, is everything in the premium food stakes we're NZ Inc. has staked its claim. The Wall Street Journal asks 'Is New Zealand milk safe to drink?'...



Talk in the LU staff club was around the products up-take by farmers (500 are claimed, only about 5% of the total NZ dairy estate), and efficacy. One wag said it was less effective the further you got from Lincoln campus...Researcher commissioned by Ravensdown, undertaken by Doug Edmeades, found it had 'little effect' on pasture production. And while a 'positive effect on reducing soil nitrates' was found 'but by how much is still is unknown.'

There was talk of 'commercial sensitivity' and dodgy oversight. Fonterra has known for sometime and sat on the knowledge until they floated their wee shareholder scheme. Lincoln also lost out on a major collaborative strategy with Dairy NZ to Auckland. Small country, everyone knows someone.
Oh well.



As a social scientist, and one with a hankering for more Actor-Network Theory ops, this is a great case study. They need some extra arrows...

As an employee of Lincoln University, I see a hit to our credibility that may ripple on for sometime yet.

New Zealand dairying productivity

I always browse the Friday edition of local rag The Press (okay, local rag is actually the Ellesmere Echo but it doesn't burn as well as The Press) because that's the day they run the farming section. And there I found a remarkable article, 'Importing feed 'harms productivity'' by Sue O'Dowd.

The first sentence rings like a bell: 'Productivity on dairy farms declined 0.5% a year between 2000 and 2010...'. This is from the rising costs of input such as imported feed, the revelation coming from Rob Brazendale, head of the DairyNZ productivity team.

Farmers are canny business peeps and undoubtedly watch international price movements daily to see where they are positioned. But do we as a nation labour under a myth of NZ farm productivity success?

The farming sector is groaning under growing debt, up 4.5% over the past year to over $49 billion. (Actually all NZ debt is up over the past year.)

I recall an article by economic geographer Paul McCann who listed NZ at 16th for farm productivity, hardly the 'world leader' we're accustomed to thinking of ourselves. The rural land-based sector has been the butt of a number of jokes and insults. Some warranted - dirty dairying a case in point - but agriculture still pulls in over 60% of this country's foreign earnings.

If the flagship industry has declining productivity within our key export sector, a hard rains gonna fall.