Professional private chef. Into crypto. Love gardening & have small orchard & keep Chickens & ducks. my motto: been there, done some & still learning daily.
A small group of men, with no mandate from New Zealanders, are on the brink of transferring our crown jewels to India: premium kiwi and apple cultivars and growing skills developed over a century.
Their economic model, intended to justify the transfer, ignored its consequence.
The India FTA doesn't just sell India our fruit - it commits us in writing to make India better at growing it. We've committed to "action plans" to increase the yield of India's competing orchards. If we fail, India can suspend access to their market. We are contractually bound to arm our own rival.
Our edge is skill not size - India already grows several times our crop. Our orchards yield ~60 tonnes a hectare against India's 6 to 10; for kiwifruit, 40 against 2 or 3. That century-old gap is the only reason we win - and it's exactly what we've promised to close. India can use our skills and fruit genetics across 300,000 hectares paying their workers 1/35th of our wages.
Zespri fruit earns a 50-75% premium across Asia; India sits next door with cheaper freight and labour, ready to undercut us in China, Japan and Europe. We did this once with Chile - and Chile became a competitor.
And the number used to sell it? 0.07% of GDP by 2036 - $387 million a year, a decade out, three-quarters of it just trade shifted from markets we already serve. Equivalent to what the government borrows every 12 days. The model priced the tariff breaks and nothing else - not the competitor we're building, nor the customers we'll lose.
Silent on a loss that compounds for generations.
@Infideliter2022@NzFubar First hand perspective here. When granted my indev. Resident visa I was surprised to learn that I was allowed to vote. Never even crossed my mind before that I would. To do so is a privilege for me and I am grateful for it.
@Infideliter2022@NzFubar First hand perspective here. When granted my indev. Resident visa I was surprised to learn that I was allowed to vote. Never even crossed my mind before that I would. To do so is a privilege for me and I am grateful for it.
Catherine Austin Fitts warns that programmable money, digital ID and AI-driven mass surveillance form three interlocking pillars of a digital control grid, enabling authorities to centrally enforce desired behaviour by "threatening to turn off your money unless you do exactly as you're told".
"You're talking about moving into a slavery system where... your life can be controlled by people who make the rules very centrally, and enforce them centrally... stripping you of any constitutional rights or property rights."
The editors of the world's most prestigious medical journals are sounding the alarm, and nobody is listening.
"We have peer reviewed, high impact editors in most of the journals that are the most high impact, saying that they don't believe what is being published in those journals is trustworthy anymore."
"The BMJ, The Lancet, all of those editors have come out and said, we have a huge problem. We can't replicate this research and we actually don't even know who did the research."
"Everywhere we've looked for corruption, we've found it."
Emily Kaplan, co-founder of the Broken Science Initiative.
@broken_science