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The PR failures of US agribusiness create
challenges for New Zealand exporters and farmers
It's not often that New Zealand media
provide insight into the issues which ultimately drive demand for our food
products in world markets. Saturday's NZ Herald is an exception. In an
excellent feature article Food Fight: the latest battle in the US food wars
Peter Huck exposes the grass roots war between agribusiness and activists for
the hearts and minds of US consumers and policy makers.
The article says nothing about the
implications for New Zealand, but it's easy to join the dots. One of the big
trends is for locally-grown produce bought directly from the producer or as
Michelle Obama has demonstrated, grown organically in your own backyard. If this
trend shows some longevity, it creates some real challenges for NZ food and
beverage producers who until now have seen our South Pacific provenance as a
marketing asset rather than a liability.
For Kiwi farmers, it is also likely that
public reaction to some of the excesses of industrial agriculture in the United
States will spill over into public debate and possible tougher regulations
here. Local green activists, and some sloppy journalists, have repeatedly shown
themselves incapable of distinguishing between agribusiness as practised
elsewhere in the industrial world and what happens on the Kiwi farm.
Not that you can blame them when the
representatives of US agribusiness keep scoring own goals. In a move that Peter
Huck describes as a ‘cackhanded PR move' the Mid American Croplife Association
that represents pesticide companies wrote a letter to the US First Lady
reminding her of the role conventional agriculture plays in the US. Use
chemicals, Michelle, was its message.
Meanwhile Monsanto, which markets GM seeds
and Roundup, has gone on the offensive, with big newspaper ads. These are
intended to reinforce the company's sustainability credentials, but their size,
cost and sophistication only serve to reinforce the divide between Big Food and
the dreams of consumer activists which are for small, sustainable and local.
The incredible thing is that Monsanto ran a
similar ad-based campaign in Europe in the early 1990s, trying to win support
for GM technology. It was a total failure; succeeding only in polarising the
public and in the banning of GM crops from many European countries.
Monsanto Roundup is superb technology. Its
contribution to soil and water conservation - in terms of improved carbon
retention in soils, reduced soil compaction and loss during cultivation and
more efficient use of fossil fuels - is probably without parallel.
In contrast, its commercialisation of GM
has been a public relations failure - creating a business model that everyone
loves to hate. Doubtless it's one of the major drivers of the growing public
reaction to Big Food in the US, as well as the entrenched attitude in the NZ
body politick that all GM is bad. Which is far from true.
- Trevor Walton
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