Winemaking essential but home-building not
It is sacrilege I know; but is winemaking really an essential service? It is not self-evidently essential, like lamb chops and bleach. Though I accept it does have morale-boosting properties that other supermarket staples lack, especially when you are stuck at home for at least four weeks. But it is all a moot point really, because the Government says it is essential, and so are beer brewing and cider-making for that matter. And the production of packaging to sell those products and their transport.
Winemaking fits the principle the prime minister laid out on Monday when she announced the imminent level four lockdown to thwart the spread of coronavirus. ‘‘Those who are part of the food supply chain, who provide for our supermarkets, are part of our essential primary industry,’’ she said. What does not quite fit is the insistence we are achieving this shutdown as completely as possible, with an absolute minimum of business activity.
And that has been the Government’s mantra in imploring Kiwis to accept the draconian rewriting of the rules of their lives and their finances.
As Paul Stocks, deputy chief executive of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), put it: ‘‘We need as many businesses as possible to close their premises now if our one shot at beating the virus is to be successful.’’
Another of his phrases was, ‘‘only businesses absolutely essential to the necessities of life’’ would remain open.
Perhaps that explains the confusion early this week as businesses struggled to understand if they would remain open or be required to close.
Retailing giant The Warehouse made a public disclosure through the NZX to confirm its 92 stores would remain open. But then Stocks said the Government had not decided the retailer could continue to operate and cautioned firms about assuming they would remain open before ‘‘they have received that adjudication.’’ The Warehouse is a publicly traded company and was forced to halt trading.
It did not inspire confidence in The Warehouse. But neither does it inspire confidence in MBIE, which appears to be broadly in charge of deciding who makes the essential services list. It may surprise many New
Zealanders that the necessities of life include a 2020 wine vintage, roughly 90 per cent of which is expected to be shipped, and sipped, abroad.
And to be clear, this is winemaking that involves a harvest that is currently under way. Pickers, for whom growers and vineyards are scrambling to make distancing provisions in meals and housing as well as on the job, are not yet halfway through this year’s crop.
After that will come the less labour intensive fermentation, barrel ageing, bottling and distribution. It is a similar story for other crops – apples and kiwifruit in particular. The growers of both are having to make similar provisions for their labourers. Even in this extraordinary year, harvesting is mainly done by transitory labourers not local to the area; their safe housing and sanitation is clearly more difficult to ensure than the ordinary population, making their risk for virus spread higher.
It is easy to simply say, as the Government is currently doing, that we are feeding the nation.
But we are, in fact, doing something more complicated.
Something that is vastly more difficult to distil in an urgent soundbite. The overwhelming majority of New Zealandproduced food goes abroad. As a rule of thumb the figure is about 90 per cent for meat and crops, it is a little higher for milk.
So primarily – in continuing to grow, harvest, and process food – we are feeding the world. We are also taking a bit more risk ourselves to do it.
We are also keeping foreign exchange earnings flowing to New Zealand while other industries are shut down. Meat, dairy and fruit exports were worth about $18 billion last year.
That is a good thing in a time of global emergency. But in terms of fighting the spread of the virus it is also a compromise.
No-one is denying government decisions have needed to be fast and furious to get ahead of contagion. And, as people are now fond of saying, we are on a wartime footing. But what is becoming clear too is that we are also embarking on wartime dissembling.