The kneejerk reaction to that question is to blame the supermarkets - “the duopoly” - after all, the Commerce Commission reported their profits were excessive by international comparisons and as a result, the Government has appointed a commissioner to oversee them. But the supermarkets come at the end of our food supply chain and get a lot of attention because they are highly visible, and if you look behind the barcodes of any of the goods on their shelves, you will find a lot of companies clipping the profit ticket before you get to eat any of it.
Let’s just take one item - bread. Chances are the supermarket loaf you bought today was made from wheat grown in Australia, bought and sold by commodity dealers, transported by foreign-owned ships and trucked to one of the foreign-owned flour mills, transported to a foreign-owned bakery and transported again to the supermarket.
You probably noticed the word “transported” a few times in that last sentence. Transportation by vehicles dependent on petrol and diesel (which we import) contributes significantly to the price you pay for your daily bread as its ingredients travel from paddock to plate.
“Foreign-owned” is a term that keeps cropping up because the reality is that overseas multinationals now own many of our once-iconic brands and are earning profits for their offshore owners, who of course determine the price we now pay for them.
And why does the wheat come from Australia? Because many of our farmers turned their wheat fields over to dairy production as there was more profit in it.
None of this has happened by accident. From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, consecutive Labour and National-led governments embraced neoliberal economic theory which held that the state should not be running businesses and that the twin policies of free market and free trade would allow entrepreneurial New Zealanders to create wealth which would trickle down to the lower orders, and we would be all be better off.
Well, of course, that didn’t happen because wealth doesn’t trickle down; it largely sticks with those who have it.
And while it’s true our cost of living is influenced by things that happen the world over which we have no control, such as wars and pandemics interrupting supply, it’s also true there is much we can do to reduce the cost of food on our own shores, not least of which is to address the way property and other assets create untaxed wealth, which is preventing us from developing a fairer society.
With more tax-collected funds, we could, for example, open co-operative grocery stores as they have in countries such as Italy where the local community owns the store, gets cheaper food and shares in the profits. We could subsidise food, so we pay a domestic price for it and not an export price, or feed all school children a free, healthy sit-down lunch, as they do in Sweden and Finland.
In short, there are many things we could do to lower the price of food but to do so, it seems to me that as we stumble towards a general election, we really need to think beyond the immediate issue of the cost of living to ask ourselves some hard questions about how it got this way and what we think we stand for as a people and a nation.
Do we want a fair society where every child gets an equal chance to grow up healthy and be the best they can be, or not?
Do we believe everyone should be able to afford healthy food, or not?
And what is the purpose of our economy? Is it that a few of us can get wealthy at the expense of the many? Or to create the greatest good, for the greatest number of us, over the longest period of time?
A few years ago, I interviewed Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhammed Yunis, who said to me, “We follow the theory. Theory should follow us!”
In other words, economics is a human construct.
We can continue to drive our economy relying on competition to perpetuate the ME society or we can use co-operation as the alternative engine for our age to recreate the WE society we once had.
Profit in and of itself is not a bad thing. It’s how that profit is made and who benefits that counts.
Bryan Bruce’s documentary The Food Crisis screens on Sky Open (Channel 4 on Freeview and 15 on Sky) on Sunday, September 3 at 8.30pm.
