I was sitting outside in NZ’s Northland sunshine, December 2024. All year round, it’s the warmest district in the country and has a wealth of orange orchards. The temperature was 24 deg and set to get warmer. I was eating an orange however, that had traveled all the way to NZ from 7798 miles away. Grown in the US of A. I don’t generally buy imported oranges on principle, however someone else had brought me these. Similarly, I also had in my fridge, some Australian oranges. Those had traveled 2583 miles to get here. How big were those carbon footprints? Good luck with those calculations. Generally speaking, it would appear, according to the Davos boys, we shouldn’t be traveling too far or buying stuff that traveled a long way?
Now Northland is known for its orange orchards. It is one of the two leaders in our citrus industry. The other district is Gisborne. Twenty years ago I lived in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, which is near there, during which time we had free access to a local orchard to pick all the oranges we wanted. Why? Because the owner told us the supermarkets weren’t interested in buying them and to pick and sell them themselves was not cost effective at all. Meanwhile, just down the road the local supermarket sold fruit from, you guessed it, Australia and the US. So we would drive to town to shop, passing multiple orange orchards with beautiful ripe oranges falling on the ground and frequently going to waste.
Check out Davos and their ‘sustainable menu’. No mention of where they sourced their fruit from.
Can you see the hypocrisy? And the scam that it is?
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hi Pam, good to see you again.
We had a citrus orchard above Tauranga Harbour in the 60s, and 70s.
The returns on our produce went steadily down, in real terms.
The propaganda was that we must export. By exporting, we could earn overseas funds and with them we could buy English cars and tractors, (with Lucas electrics…whoopeee-dooooo)
So in order to export, we needed to grow fruit bigger (fertilizer!!!!!) and without blemishes (insecticides!!!!!)
Exporters and importers made a lot of money, but we still went slowly backwards.
Then the trrrreacherous Sassenachs joined the European Common Market, and dropped us, and even moreso Australia, who couldn’t believe the poms could be THAT crass, in the doodoo.
Which was a huge blessing, because we stopped being loyal to the mother country, and started getting machinery with decent electrics.
Exporting and importing should be minimized. Self-sufficiency, relative always, feels better than dependence. Once, we tried to produce our own car, called “Trekka”. It had problems, and didn’t get support; i don’t know the details, but it must be time we had another crack at it.
We could produce a version of the Ford Model A, but with better windscreen wipers, and go back to gravel roads? That would slow down the BMW drivers, and lower the road toll.
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Hi Mr Parrot … good to see you too. Lol, love your last paragraph. A really good plan IMO. Interesting all the rest you say too. We can’t have self sufficiency though. The govt may get the impression we don’t need them ; )
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Shameful! Utterly shameful but I’m eternally grateful for my own orange trees which crop the best tasting oranges I’ve ever tasted.
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Lucky you Di. Homegrown is definitely the best 🙂
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