That focus is making us poorer, degrading our communities and diminishing the environmental commons upon which we all rely, including a healthy, resilient economy.
Agronomy is a focus on our feet rather than looking up and around at the world in which we live.
As a people, we are not good at strategy.
We follow short-term finance and the often illusory promise of technocrats. We walk blind and naked into the traffic of the world economy thinking the market will provide.
Some think we don’t need national strategy, though they will listen to the large corporate that clearly do.
Our primary sector strategy is particularly bad, as we witness each time our commodity prices slide lower in real terms. GMOs will lock us into the commodity track. They represent an appalling strategy.
With a poor sellers’ position in the marketplace, a focus on ever-higher production of commodities is nothing more than short-term industrial thinking – Gandhi’s nine-day wonder – ultimately unsustainable.
We produce more, we cut our costs, the buyers clap their hands in glee then use their power to discount the price.
We might get a year or so of margin increase before the price drives down to something slim for a big producer or something negative for a small grower. The big producer then buys the land of the small grower and gets bigger still.
The big growers remain enamoured with bulk production of dross because they can still win under that model.
These industrial thinkers are also the strongest advocates for big-ticket, production-orientated investments such as the Ruataniwha dam.
Think of it as a land deal.
We should have shifted our strategic focus decades ago from gross production to price position – the creation and retention of value, not volume.
That focus requires a different way of looking at ownership. It matters who owns and where they live, how we can redesign our landscapes and soils for economic opportunity. We need a quality focus with the multiplication and retention of value.
And with that focus we get a better environment and a better society as well. In fact, they are critical to that value creation.
GMOs lock us into the opposite – short or non-existent value chains of commodities owned by the few, more and more absentee, with a poorer ethic toward community and place, using less and less cheaper and cheaper labour.
That is a clear recipe for decline. It is economic madness.
Why there are still advocates for more failed commoditisation and reduction in what quality position we have is fascinating.
Production was our colonial legacy – produce more to feed Britain. When Britain joined the European Union in 1973 we no longer had a relatively fair price for our produce.
Rather than daring to think we might need a change in strategic focus, we decided not to change, to stay within our old paradigm of cheap production.
The agricultural universities are some of the worst in advocating the gross production line because that is what they know and that is what they think.
Decades after we needed a change in direction, the dominant teaching of Massey and Lincoln was still the agronomic techniques of maximising production. Far less important were integrated land use systems, diversity, price position, risk or the dominant environmental, social and economic trends.
We were taught to stay on what Willard Cochrane called the “technology treadmill”, running faster and faster, going inexorably backwards.
When margins squeeze, we demand the next technology and the next, each creating a new problem and a new margin squeeze.
We weren’t taught about Cochrane’s thinking. That might have opened a few eyes to the Moby Dick madness of it all – perfectly rational activities toward a bonkers end. We weren’t taught to get off the treadmill.
We were taught the very opposite; to hold as a sacred creed the ideals of 1970s United States Department of Agriculture chief Earl Butz – the advocate of the anti-farmer, agri-business corporations.
He argued famously that farmers should “get big or get out” and “plant fencerow to fencerow”. Those “inevitable” sentiments were accorded the status of gospel. They were not inevitable but they taught us to make them so.
Look deep in this background when listening to someone from Massey or Lincoln and ask what they like to measure the most. If it is levels of production then move on quickly. If they have nothing to say about quality market position to retain price, commodity trends or the health of the environment or the local community, then run.
Because this is the legacy of that thinking: the big get bigger and tend more to be absentee so both the profits and the expenditure is exported out of province. Processing is centralised (somewhere else) and so we lose more money flow.
Fewer people are employed on lower conditions. The small towns wither through lack of funds and opportunities and the hamlets die.
Look to the US for the evidence of this where 40 years after Butz the countryside becomes a factory, more homogeneous and our environment is treated as a toilet for those who claim they have a right to choose to use it so.
GMO advocates’ claims of choice are empty.
That is the argument for the choice to pollute and degrade others’ opportunities or the choice of the technologist to work within the thought confines of their Petrie dish and white coat.
Their choice to act without wider consideration does not give them the right to do so. That is pure anti-social arrogance.
We do not need to follow this future.
The alternative strategy can create a Tuscany with layers of value creating yet more layers of value – a virtuous circle rather than a vicious circle heading for Mordor, for the benefit of fewer and fewer.
Chris Perley has a background in strategy, policy and operational management in provincial economies and land use. He is a past researcher at Otago University’s Centre for Sustainability.
