New Zealand to Accelerate the Exportation of Its Remaining Top Soil to China
April 8th, 2008Kiwis will get even cheaper jandles in return.
Bargains.
Sorry, I don’t feel like looking at this one squarely in the eyes right now. It’s too grim, and too close to home.
Via: New Zealand Herald:
Helen Clark said the free trade agreement opened the door for New Zealand business to step up the pace in China.
“We’ve scarcely scratched the surface with what’s possible.”
—
That’s right, Helen. I see bits of it floating out to sea when it rains.
How about country of origin labels? Is that possible? Never mind.
Does anyone know how the Yellow River in China got its name? It came from rice-agriculture causing China’s rich yellow loess soil to wash away into the river.
So new Zealand thinks its going to get rich from “free trade” with China. Ha!
When are the countries of the world going to figure out that when you try to go head-to-head with a country that is little more than a giant gulag, where the motto is “Life is cheap”, they are only going to be waging a race to the bottom that they neither can, nor should even want, to win.
“race to the bottom”
yes, I think that is a pretty apt description of NZ’s recent history (since the late 1970s or so).
NZ strikes me as the ultimate imperial vassal state–pretending to be independent but always paying tribute to whichever emperor it perceives as powerful and wealthy.
NZ was tied economically and politically to the British Empire from 1840 until 1941.
Then it switched political allegiance to the American Empire, since it feared being overrun by the Japanese Empire and then the Soviet Empire.
The British cut NZ adrift economically in 1974 by joining the EEC and ending NZ’s status as the UK’s dairy and sheep farm in the South Pacific.
And now, after many decades of thrashing about in fits of Chicago School economic and monetarist vivisection, NZ’s ruling elite are as one (quelle surprise?!) in determining that NZ must bow down before the Chinese and American Empires if it is to prosper.
Until 1984, NZ politics was pretty simple: the farmers versus the trade unionists. It was like that for more than 100 years. the business interests of course sided with the farmers. and the balance of power shifted back and forth. but since 1984, we’ve had the Thatcherisation/Blairisation of everything. in other words, it’s all a scam, a one-party state with two factions scrapping it out for their chance to pull the levers and ride around in ministerial limousiones. a charade.
and now we have the hideous spectacle of every bit of former sheep and grain crop land being irrigated and converted to dairy farms, so we can have a 10 or 20 year bonanza in dairy that will ultimately deplete aquifers, salinate the land, decimate soil nutrients and structure, and poison rivers, lakes and estuaries with effluent for the benefit of a few wealthy corporate farming cliques.
way to go, eh?
very smart stuff.
that’s why i also think Kevin’s headline referring to the export of our topsoil to China is particularly true and frightening.
NZ used to produce nearly all of its own food, including grains. it has always imported some things (e.g. sugar) from other places in the South Pacific. And of course guano-based fertilizer was raided from places like Nauru. but if we wreck our soil fertility for a few years of higher dairy exports, the future will not be so rosy, imho.
sorry for the long post…
oh, and Helen Clark, she would bomb Afghan kids if she thought it would win her cudos in the Imperial Capital. nothing new there…
tochigi, have you read this book?
http://www.greghallett.com/bmg.html
tochigi,
Your description of New Zealand politics could apply equally well to just about every so-called democracy these days. The political establishment allows for only two factions, the neoliberals and the neoconservatives. They differ only slighly in strategy; but there goal is the same – destroying their own country’s soverignty and completely ignoring the hopes and wishes of their own people, all in an effort to create the elites’ long desired global corporate state.