Tommy Wilson: Selling our souls for profit

Manuka honey can boost our trading until the cows come home, as they seem to be doing now.

They say that there is no such thing as a free lunch and the same could be said about the current free trade deal that, at the moment, is blowing away quicker than a Donald Trump toupee in a Washington wind.

Somewhere along the food chain of free trade and free lunches someone pays and more often than not it is the user at the bottom of the food chain with the least who picks up the tab.

By all accounts one of the prices we will pay if this free trade deal goes ahead is the cost of our medicine and, again in this country, the poorest are the least healthy. A lot of this poor health can be directly attributed to the health of our land, waterways and harbours.

Where once the free lunch was first dined on back in the day when this Bay had plenty, we now pollute our whenua (land) and waterways in what some now call the Spray of Plenty. Today, the two trade taonga (treasures), besides tourists, are cows and kiwifruit - and the price we are prepared to pay to keep them delivering profits should be questioned while we still have the clean, green clock ticking for our tamariki.

With tourists, the only pollutant is visual when it comes to an army of walk socks and bermuda shorts pounding the pavements of Tauranga.

On the other side of the balance sheet of likes, looks and boardwalk walkers is the employment potential within the tourism sector that, by all accounts, is epic considering there are as many Maori unemployed as there are working in tourism-related businesses and, doubling one takes care of the other.

So therein lies the silver lining of our long white cloud. Now could be a good time to diversify our "free trade" portfolio given the honeymoon with Fonterra and friesians is at an all-time low.

For me it is honey itself that could sit alongside tourism as the silver lining of our long-term sustainable trading, and Comvita in our own back yard is an ethical and environmental investment we should promote offshore, until the cows come home - as they are doing right now. Some of us make no secret in celebrating the downturn in dairying now that the inconvenient truth about what phosphates have done to our waterways has been outed.

Hopefully the same will be seen in what copper-based sprays are doing to the health of our whenua and whanau. The inconvenient truth about this short-term "profits-before-people" practice is we are now pouring on more poison per year (2.5kg of pure copper sulphate per hectare of kiwifruit every time we spray, and this can be fortnightly) than lies in the Rena out on the reef (300 tonnes of copper filings).

Yet, for some inconvenient reason, we stay silent with no hakas or protest marches. So what are we prepared to trade off for the silver lining of Aotearoa? If it is the environment, we surely need to think again. And what do we get back besides a legacy of pollution for our children?

According to scientific research the copper-based spray we apply in ever-increasing amounts has a shelf life of 65 years. This means it will still have half the toxicity as the day it was applied.

What will we be trading then? Like the famous prophetic American Indian saying goes: "When all we have left is paper money to eat, and the rivers, the land and the forests have been poisoned for profit, then and only then will we realise what we have done."

We have the future of much more than major corporations, conglomerates and dairy and horticultural stakeholders to consider when we talk free trade. Perhaps there is another currency to consider that isn't cash-based but cultural. If we truly are kaitiaki ki te whenua (guardians of the land for tomorrow's tamariki) then we need to start being just that if we want a fair free trade deal for our kids to inherit.

If free trade is about free and healthy generations to come then let's start doing deals, upfront and out in the open. If not, let's hold on to what we have, that the rest of the world wants, at all costs. It belongs to us all and to those to come.

-broblack@xtra.co.nz

Tommy Wilson is a best-selling author and local author.