New Zealand: Sitting on a Goldmine

New Zealand has an abundance of natural resources, oil and natural gas, coal, agricultural land, you name it. There used to be an oil field up in Murchison, everyone has forgotten about it now. Someone lit a 'living flame' up there not so long ago, from a fissure where gas emits naturally.

If we're talking coal I describe it like this; coal from the Ruhr valley in Germany can power German industry for the next few hundred years (one of the world's biggest industrialised economies). Well, there is more coal on the West Coast of the South Island than in all of the Ruhr, and that's not counting the rest of New Zealand. By that measure, NZ can be powered by coal for the next few thousand years. It's a glut of natural resources. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

But given all these advantages I still think the one big thing New Zealand is sitting on, that I'm sure Americans would exploit fully, is not even this type of resource. The resource that we fail to fully exploit, it's so obvious we look at it every day, is an intellectual one, it's the people of the country itself and what they know.

What am I going on about? Start with soil, there are much more fertile areas out there, much better than anywhere in New Zealand. I swear that there are soils elsewhere so rich that if you were hungry you could eat it. Sow a seed and next day the plant is knee high (okay I made that bit up).

But what this does is develop lazy farmers. New Zealand farmers have to work on their soil, they have to make it work, and the reward is knowledge about how to farm.

Then take Africa, all of sub-Saharan Africa to be precise, and they have soil that needs work, constant management, except wars and arbitrary national boundaries have jiggered their prospects - until recently. But that is about to change, that's right, sub-Saharan Africa is emerging and it is vast, with farmland aplenty and they need the intellectual property to harness that potential.

I'm not talking about New Zealand farming Africa. Africans farm it, what NZ needs to do is license them to use our intellectual property, our computer programs, our systems, our guidance, our technology. You could take NZ's agricultural graduates, all of them, every year and send them to Africa and after two hundred years you'd have not even scratched the surface.

New Zealand should endeavour to be the Microsoft of food production. Why is it not doing this? Then there is Asia and South America, the world is literally NZ's proverbial oyster. But start with Africa first as they're honest and will pay, the rest of the world not so, they'd just rip NZ off, so start with Africa first, learn how to set things up; software engineering, consultancy, farm management, you name it, then roll the whole thing out with embedded security.

Xero I hear you say. No not them, and most of NZ's software companies are headed in the wrong direction, in my opinion (I don't own any Xero shares and likely will never own any), think agriculture and those areas that badly need farm technology to feed their people.