The big risk to NZ Inc
Who is Jeremy Rifkin and why does he have economists worried? After Europe and China, his message of disruptive change is now stirring interest in New Zealand.
Artificial meat gets you thinking. If it is another exponential technology – a wave breaking over the world in the next five to 15 years – how can the New Zealand economy survive?
Auckland food futurist Dr Rosie Bosworth sounded the alarm bells at the Tipping Points conference, hosted by the Environmental Defence Society (EDS) last August.
Bosworth says lab-grown meat only got going in 2013 when a Dutch university start-up – funded by the wealth of Google’s Sergey Brin – managed to culture strips of beef muscle and produce a first hamburger patty.
Now there are a host of hi-tech start-ups flooding into the field, aiming to make artificial yet realistic everything, from chicken and fish, to milk and even leather, she says.
And it is a certainty that the price of these ‘‘animal-less’’ foods will drop to a fraction of anything New Zealand could possibly grow in a field.
The reasons are simple. You only need a few cells to start a culture. And the production is super efficient.
Bosworth says it takes 23 calories of feed to grow a calorie of prime steak, but just three calories of nutrient solution to grow the same calorie of lab meat.
Then there is the real saving to consider – the saving of the planet.
Conventional agriculture is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Farming beats even transport on that. And methane-farting cattle are the worst culprits.
Bosworth says factories growing ‘‘cellular ag’’ meat would slash land use, water use and climate emissions all by 90 to 95 per cent.
The world couldn’t not do it. It would be like flicking off the switch on ecosystem degradation.
Bosworth says cultured milk offers a similar environmental promise and so a similar threat to the New Zealand economy.
Substitute milk can be produced from nearly any plant protein, not just almond or soy, but peas and hemp. As the manufacturing processes are being perfected, it is also on an exponentially dropping price and emissions curve.
So long as the taste is right, there are the other decisive consumer advantages. No antibiotics, hormones or animal diseases. No bloody abattoirs to think about either.
However, the price curve is the thing. If you are not hearing about it yet, says Bosworth, it is because the price of a single lab-grown meatball was still about $1400 in 2016.
By last year, this had halved. And it will keep on halving each year until suddenly you look around and discover it is the ridiculously cheap option, costing just cents at the supermarket.
‘‘They aim to be at price parity in about five years’ time with conventional meat products. Two bucks a kilo, right? How will commodity agriculture ever compete with that?’’ Bosworth asks.
She says when New Zealand farmers talk about coming technological revolutions, they think of paddocks fitted with precision sensors, robot milking sheds, self-driving fruit pickers, drones for herding sheep – a game New Zealand could compete in.
Yet now that is not even looking like a game at all. Technology – whipped along by the imperatives of climate change, population growth and sustainability – might just reinvent world food production from the ground up.
And that would leave New Zealand, with its grassy paddocks, great genetics and latest irrigation systems, with a massive investment in a basically obsolete industrial infrastructure.
A stranded asset of nation-sinking proportions, to use the economic jargon.
It takes 23 calories of feed to grow a calorie of prime steak, but just three calories of nutrient solution to grow the same calorie of lab meat.
Food futurist Dr Rosie Bosworth
It is a snapshot of why not to be complacent. We live in a time of both some exponentially accelerating problems, but also some exponentially developing solutions. And the two are liable to collide in ways that produce unexpected winners and losers.
For a small country like New Zealand especially – hidden away at the bottom of the world, cruising along in a certain degree of comfort these past 20 years – we could be vulnerable if one year everything lurches off in a direction we are not anticipating.
Perhaps it is for this reason that a new documentary – one some have compared to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth – has made a minor stir after doing a round of sponsored screenings in February.
You may have heard about it: The Third Industrial Revolution. Produced by Vice Media, it features US futurologist Jeremy Rifkin simply summarising his many books on technology and its economic impacts.
But Rifkin makes a case that is recognisable and compelling. And if he is to be believed, European countries are already reorganising their economies along the lines he suggests.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a big supporter, he says. She wanted to see him within weeks of her first taking office.
Now whole regions – like Rotterdam, Luxembourg and northern France – have produced Rifkin-inspired development strategies.
And he says China is on board with his vision too. Its leaders are telling their ministries to bone up on his books and invest in the grand economic themes he has identified.
David Henley, an Auckland activist and student at Otago University’s Centre for Sustainability, heard the documentary was coming and persuaded the Resource Management Law Association (RMLA) and other green groups to host public showings around New Zealand.
‘‘The documentary pulls together a lot of stuff and gives you a narrative you can get in behind,’’ he says.
In Wellington, a senior Treasury official saw it and immediately arranged a repeat screening for ministry staff.
Henley says he has spoken personally to Climate Change Minister James Shaw and Environment Minister David Parker about it. ‘‘The response is just snowballing.’’
Indeed, a Ministry for the Environment-backed invitation has gone out to Rifkin from the RMLA, asking if he can deliver his message personally at a conference in September.
Henley agrees there is the good dash of self-promotion with Rifkin as there is with any self-appointed guru. ‘‘And one problem with Rifkin is that he’s really expensive to get.’’
Yet New Zealand knows it is at some kind of crossroads. It has been drifting along in a comfortable rut, using its abundant water and land to produce commodity dairy products for an emerging Asian market.
Meanwhile our climate commitments have been put on hold. We allowed our once worldleading carbon trading scheme to become corrupted by bogus foreign credits, while also stalling on the inclusion of agricultural emissions.
A new government – particular one with the Green Party sharing power – says it wants to create a larger political vision of the future.
There are some big plans to bring in a Zero Carbon Act, along