Labour's Election Bribe

Desperate to get back into power in October, New Zealand's Labour are reported to be about to announce the removal of GST (VAT) tax on food.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/494590/national-claims-labour-s-tax-policy-will-remove-gst-on-fruit-and-vegetables

But, a good argument can be made for this, lowering the cost of living and improving what people consume must be seen as a good thing. 

Netherlands Farmers Protest

From Dutch farmers: HELP !! No farmers, no food

350 tractors spell it out in a field in The Netherlands.

The Problem is Worldwide

Elon Musk has accurately outlined the problem. In a leaked internal email to staff, he said he had a 'super bad feeling' about the economy:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/428840

Then, on Twitter he has previously stated:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/428451

"It has been raining money on fools for too long. Some bankruptcies need to happen," ..... "Also, all the Covid stay-at-home stuff has tricked people into thinking that you don't actually need to work hard. Rude awakening inbound!"

I agree with Musk on both counts. I have frequently said the bailouts due to the GFC have entrenched incompetence. Businesses should not be too big to fail. If they fail, let the bargain hunters devour them, and out of the change grow stronger. Yes, this disrupts lives, but look at where we are at right now. Things are going to be worse.

We've been living in a huge government-led Ponzi scheme, created using the taxpayers money. This couldn't be sustained so they manufactured a pandemic, or scamdemic as I like to call it. The response was planned to crash the world economy. They, and by 'they' I'm talking about the 'powers-that-be' for want of a better term, didn't care about how many people were killed, all they cared about was saving their own scrawny necks and the corrupt companies underneath them.

The 'Great Reset' is an arse covering exercise. 

But it didn't work well enough as people didn't 'drink the tea'. Turns out the people are not that stupid. Well, except silly countries like Australia and New Zealand, they're very silly. What to do then? Need for war. So, NATO prods the bear - Russia. Now, famine looms in countries relying on Russian and Ukrainian food, while energy prices soar. Will profits from high oil prices be returned to the people for better healthcare and education? That was me kidding you, you can stop laughing as we know that will never happen.

Basically, what I'm outlining is a massive stitch-up. The only way to correct this is to remove those in power. We need new governments with new ideas. The current crop are trying to destroy you and ultimately kill you if they can. Don't let them.

Hunger Crisis

Here's a very good rundown on the coming food crisis.

 

The War on Food

That's right, the world may starve. This isn't a drill, this is very real:

https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-05-26-global-wheat-war-now-underway.html

As one of the world’s top producers of wheat, Russia in many ways holds the keys to the global food supply. And unless the Biden regime stops its futile crusade against the country, much of the world will end up starving to death.

The corporate-controlled media wants us to believe that Vladimir Putin is the culprit, but the reality is that Joe Biden and his handlers are tearing down global trade in a hissy fit response to Putin’s takedown of the deep state in Ukraine.

Both Ukraine and Russia have cut off most grain exports in order to protect their own people, as has India and Kazakhstan. These protectionist measures are hurting other countries such as Egypt that rely on grain imports from Europe and Russia.

CF Industries Announces Fertiliser Delays

Farmers in the US are facing delays or non-delivery of critical fertiliser supplies just as the planting season begins. This could lead to serious food shortages in a few months when harvesting begins and crop yields fall.

See this link from CF Industries: https://www.cfindustries.com/newsroom/2022/union-pacific-shipping-restrictions

Then, we have the restriction of exports from China due to the Shanghai lockdowns, and war in the Ukraine leading to no crops being planted at all.

For New Zealand, it gets worse too. The closure of its one oil refinery means: if the supply chain cannot deliver finished fuels, farmers cannot produce as they need diesel to run their tractors. We are sitting on the precipice and are about to fall off the cliff.

Guns, David Tipple and Priorities

Just a thought; if David Tipple, the owner of Gun City stores across New Zealand fails the fit and proper person test to hold a licence to sell firearms, then should Pak'nSave and Countdown lose their licence to sell food? The logic is that Pak'nSave and Countdown kill people by causing obesity, far more people in fact than a David Tipple bought gun ever did. Hmm?

The NZ government plans on buying back guns after the Christchurch Mosques attack. I'm not convinced that is a good use of the estimated $300-700 million cost. Wouldn't it make more sense to ensure gun licence conditions were met, and put the money that would go into a buyback, into NZ schools instead?

Obesity Epidemic

I have mentioned several times that on my Italy trip I failed to see anyone obese. Three weeks walking kilometres every day and not a single obese person did I see. Then back living in New Zealand, I don't have to go far to find obesity, a simple trip to the supermarket and guess what, that's right, at least 25% of shoppers are obese. That's a problem.

I've been analysing this and one thing is for sure, the New Zealand diet is very bad but then a lot of what Italians eat is bad also. Italians have very sweet breakfasts, I find what they eat hard to consume at that time of day, and they love their soda drinks. They drink Coke all the time.

So what's up? How come Italians are in such better shape than Kiwis?

I think the following answers the question:

They don't consume as much in a day. That's right, the overall quantity of what goes into their stomachs is less. Italians eat a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Then their activity levels are higher. They joke that their involvement in sport is watching it on television but that doesn't quite address the point. Italians are doing things, not just sport related things. They're walking, shifting furniture, whatever.

And when it comes to the main meal, they eat less meat and a lot more vegetables. This is quite noticeable and is what stands out as the major difference with NZ (which is all meat and a few vegetables, and much larger quantities overall).

We are talking cultural factors. For NZ to solve its obesity epidemic means addressing the quantities being consumed and nutritional balance. That's a hard task given how entrenched habits have become. Small scale initiatives won't work, so forget school tuck shops and what they sell. A better approach would be to remove GST on certain foodstuffs, making healthier food more affordable, diverting consumers from less desirable foods.

Then get people moving, burning off the calories.

The Future of Farming

Farming has little or no future. This is bad news for any country that relies heavily on its farmers and I'll tell you why.

To explain this story I'll start by talking about cars. Cars have changed a lot in the last few years, but if you went back to the days of the Ford Model T and took a driver in a time machine to 2008, a hundred or so years later, that driver from 1908 would easily understand how to drive a modern car, automatic transmissions and all.

But twenty years on and by 2028, the car that drives itself will be commonplace, how technology will have changed and what would our driver from 1908 think then? Would that driver from 1908 even know how to order up such a car without first going into the showroom?

What has this got to do with farming? A lot is the answer. Farmers are not like that driver from 1908, they're stuck in the Middle Ages. Even if you brought forward a farmer from thousands of years ago they'd probably still manage to figure things out.

But wait, we are about to enter an era of rapid technological change that will wipe out agriculture. It's called manufactured food. Not primary produce processed in a factory, but food manufactured (3D printed or whatever maybe in your own home, you'll have cobalt, iron and iodine delivered in sacks) from the basic elements themselves. All we are as a species is carbon based, mostly water (two of hydrogen one oxygen), with other minerals chucked in there. We are now on the threshold of manufactured food from those elements, and the quantity will be practically limitless. That's the end of farming.

This spells doom for any country like New Zealand which nearly made it. From the late 1970's to the mid 1980's its Prime Minister Rob Muldoon knew the country had to industrialise or die, but it didn't listen and turned to relying on its farmers even more than it had in the past. The dairying industry is now its top earner. But hang on, you can make milk, and have it any colour you want without involving cows, or water from the mountains, or fields of grass. Manufactured milk can even be clear like spring water itself. This means countries like New Zealand will cease to exist or become poor overnight, or both.

Who becomes rich? Industrialised countries that own the technology that's who.

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.

Food

Statement of the obvious, given New Zealand is a major food producer and exporter, how come food is so expensive in this country? Hmm? 

A rough back of the envelope calculation on my part to illustrate; if NZ milk producers were to give away the milk they simply throw away, and if every person in the country was to drink their equal share of it, then everyone would die of milk poisoning as they'd be drinking far too much of the stuff (no, I'm not talking about milk that's bad or has gone off).

The point I'm trying to make here is that food should be very cheap, given its limitless quantity. 

Why are food retailers also allowed to be wholesalers and so set the prices other competitors must charge (by setting their own wholesale price sometimes higher than they also sell in their own supermarkets)?

I mean, come on New Zealand, wake up.

The first thing this country needs is a food revolution, vote for politicians who are not funded by the big food companies.