farming

Sacrificial Lambs
Despite record global commodity prices, the rise in farm incomes here has been pathetic. Still after all these years, investors in farmland need a currency collapse to justify their speculation...
16 March 2006 - Gareth Morgan

Sharing the Sheep
Medieval farming practices remain popular in NZ agriculture - the peasants prefer socialism to efficient use of capital....
7 October 2004 - Gareth Morgan

Dairy Industry Dicing with Disaster
The Dairy Industry could fly higher - if only it allowed capital to be allocated efficiently within the industry....
21 July 2004 - Gareth Morgan

GlobalBro, Guaranteed Economic Waste
The herd has voted. The thunder of over 80% of hooves stampeding to support the unanimous preference of its elected dairy cooperative representatives, cannot be ignored –dairy farmers are solidly behind the GlobalCo concept.What was so compelling to convince farmers that this is the vehicle that’s best to take the industry to the...
19 June 2001 - Gareth Morgan

Knackering NZ's Nokia
The downstream part of the dairy industry has the potential of becoming to New Zealand what Nokia has become to Finland - a company at the centre of a cluster providing a third of the country's annual GDP growth and 20% of exports - even though it employs only 3% of the workforce. GSM technology was the key to the transformation of Finland's...
23 May 2001 - Gareth Morgan

Rarity: An Economist batting for GlobalCo.
It's been a long-held convention amongst the economics fraternity in New Zealand that the protectionism legislated to shelter the dairy industry has virtually no merit in economics and is nothing but raw political vested interest of the most avaricious kind. It is pretty easy to demonstrate the economic cost of this protectionism is substantial...
11 April 2001 - Gareth Morgan

Global Dairy Company - A Trojan Horse for Privilege
Last week I considered the three major reasons promoted by the dairy industry for why its protection from competition in exporting should be prolonged. This week it's to consideration of the major arguments against effective legislative defence of that monopoly that are in focus. There are two main arguments. Firstly, one that was well enunciated in...
14 February 2001 - Gareth Morgan

Dairy Bubble being Inflated by Xenophobia of Agrarian Politics
The latest initiative by the dairy industry to stand on its own feet is an improvement on its 1999 Mega Corp Chimera. But that's about all. As it stands the Global Dairy Company deal promises to prolong the speculative bubble in dairy farm prices, to fritter away more of New Zealand's scarce investment resources and to ensure the industry fails...
7 February 2001 - Gareth Morgan

Dairy Industry, a valuable asset; Dairy Farming, a speculative bubble
The IMF has urged the government to get off its backside and deregulate the dairy industry. Dairy farm prices are booming. Incongruous? Not really, this has become the country's most damaging on-going speculative bubble that threatens, once it's inevitably pricked, to drown farm owners and their bankers in a sea of tears. That event would confirm to New...
8 November 2000 - Gareth Morgan

Solving dairy industry waste
So you're a dairy farmer. You hear the critics of the industry, understand the points they make, know the Barbarians are at the gate and acknowledge the industry has to come up with something credible to deter the invaders. You recognise that if any industry, by virtue of protection afforded it, does not utilise investment resources as efficiently as it could,...
6 September 2000 - Gareth Morgan

Dairy industry - drowning in a swill of milk
Remember when we had sheep farmed mountain sides and the banks of the steepest gullies? The sheep retention scheme was one of those brilliant public policy initiatives that encouraged farmers to boost sheep numbers irrespective of what they were worth, even though it didn't boost the income of the sector on ioata. Then Cyclone Bola and friends came and...
23 August 2000 - Gareth Morgan

Subsidised Agricultural Exports: Our Worst Big Idea
While the East Timor events surrounding APEC were focussed on man's capacity for evil, the economic issues illustrated our penchant for hypocrisy. Unfortunately the latter demonstrated that New Zealand has little to be proud of. On the economics front APEC was notable for two things; the agreement to ban subsidies of agricultural exports, and the...
15 September 1999 - Gareth Morgan

Why the Dairy Industry's Future is critical to New Zealand's Prospects
Over the 1990's the dairy industry has contributed 30% of the increase in total export dollars earned. Tourism is pretty much the same. Thereafter it falls away to about a 20% contribution from manufacturing. So to the extent that exporting matters, the dairy industry is important - not much news in that. Currently a significant restructuring of the...
4 August 1999 - Gareth Morgan