Paul Holmes: Pride for our fallen

In great depressions, nations can get terribly stressed and agitated. Strange, unpleasant movements can grow and become powerful and people's resentments and desperations intensify.

Neighbours can rise up against each other, wars can break out. We have seen this often.

All of which is one of the reasons the reassessment of our Defence Force priorities is so timely. As Murray McCully, the Foreign Minister made clear on Q&A last weekend, we have rather a few commitments these days in our own neck of the woods, before we even contemplate assisting the Americans again with the SAS in Afghanistan. In any case, when you think about it, what business does New Zealand really have there, what strategic necessity do we have there? Indeed, whoever won a war in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan, with its towering mountains, its caves and its treacherous narrow valleys and the fierce, indignant pride of its people, has defeated every army that has crossed its borders.

I could not be at the Dawn Service at the Hastings Cenotaph yesterday because of my Saturday programme in Auckland on NewstalkZB. I went to the service on a chilly morning a few years back and the RSA gave me the honour of speaking in the hushed dark. There was a crowd of several hundred people. I spoke with pride because on the face of the Hastings Cenotaph are the names of four Holmes boys who never returned from two wars. From the Great War are the names of Reuben Holmes who died with Colonel Malone on the slopes of Chunuk Bair in August 1915. He was the first to go. Leonard Holmes and Mathew Holmes both died on the Somme, Mathew in the last months of 1918.

From World War II is the name of Kenneth Randall Holmes, the family's darling, super bright, who qualified as a chemist by studying a correspondence course at 4am every day before he went to work. Ken, having completed one suicidal tour of bombing Germany, was killed at the controls of a Wellington bomber in 1943 in the Middle East and is buried in Libya, never to return. On Nana's wall, there was always the framed standard letter from King George VI.

I was proud to stand there in the dawn and speak of the respect I had for all who served and especially to have a blood link to four of the names engraved forever in the granite behind me. I don't know, but I feel those names make me about as blue blood as you can be round here.

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Now the International Monetary Fund has chimed in, just in case you thought we might be making our way out of the economic mire sooner rather than later.

The IMF represents 185 countries. It is calling this the worst recession since the Great Depression, said the stark headline. The world economy will decline more than 1 per cent next year. This will claim more than 10 million jobs, mainly in Europe and the United States. This year is turning out to be a much bigger dog than the IMF thought it would be a year ago. It is going to take the world economy much longer to stabilise.

The numbers really are staggering. The American economy will decline next year by almost 3 per cent. Their economy has never declined since 1946, after which America's vast and bountiful resources, and its historic productive and inventive powers, saw the United States own the rest of the century.

Japan next year will contract by 6.2 per cent, Russia by 6 per cent, Germany by 6 per cent and the UK by 4 per cent. What might just save us is that China's economy will still grow, although that growth will slow to 5 per cent, it's lowest rise in GDP for two decades. India will still manage to grow by 4 per cent.

China will need our food, especially our dairy products, as we saw this week with Fonterra's bold prospect there, and the sub-continent will always need our onions.

We have plenty of onions. I have a mate who does very well exporting onions to the Indians. He has a warehouse with 0.8 ha of ventilated flooring. You have to let onions breathe, which is why we buy them in, well, onion bags, for the same reason we do not put mushrooms in plastic.

But the Indians need onions. They cannot live without onions. They can get in all sorts of states of aggravation when onions are scarce and expensive or their supply is threatened. Ministers frequently have to calm the populace by assuring them the onion price will soon come down.

The onion is a staple food group in the Indian diet. In fact, the onion may be the most produced vegetable in the world. It is eaten everywhere. It finds a place in the foods of every culture. It makes no class distinction, it is eaten by both the rich and the poor. The Indians not only import millions of tonnes of onions every year, but they export huge quantities as well, which is why Government ministers have to calm the people sometimes when the import/export ratio gets a little bit out of kilter.

I delay you in focusing on the noble onion only because John Key seems to believe that food production is a real fillip for New Zealand as the international downturn steepens. He might be right. The world always has to eat. Fonterra, now that they have managed to move on from the dreaded Sanlu disaster, are talking about increasing their exports to China threefold. This is good news. What we need is some kind of new and wildly successful delicacy made with onion and milk to sweep the world.

Although it can be one thing getting the order, of course, it can be quite another getting paid. I have heard stories in Hawke's Bay of some wine producers getting half of their price before putting the wine on a ship to Los Angeles, and never seeing the rest of the money. The wine sits in the bonded warehouses at Long Beach and is never picked up, the balance never paid. Eventually, the warehouse asks the exporters to bring their wine back to New Zealand because they need their space back.

One fellow I know was having trouble getting some textile product he was manufacturing outside Shanghai being sent to him here in New Zealand.

He had already paid a large amount of cash. No sign of the product. Through January he attempted to make communication with the factory. Finally, he demanded that his freight company go round to the place to find out what was going on. The freighter's agent in Shanghai reported back that the factory was closed. Indeed, when he looked through a window into what was once a bustling office, he saw nothing but a lone desk with a laptop on it and no sign of anyone. This is one of just thousands of factories that have closed across China. The fact is the Americans and the Europeans are staying home.

The mad orgy of mass production has finally dried up.