Milked: Industrial Dairying in New Zealand

Milked: White Lies in Dairy land

Directed by Amy Taylor (2022)

Film Review

MILKED is a feature documentary that exposes the whitewash of New Zealand’s multi-billion-dollar dairy industry. Māori activist Chris Huriwai travels around the country searching for the truth about how this source of national pride has become the biggest threat to the environment and to the farmers it exploits.

New Zealand is the world’s largest dairy exporter, and Fonterra, a former farmer’s cooperative that opened up shares to non-farmer investors in 2012.

According to several environmentalists interviewed in the film, dairy intensification is rapidly depleting New Zealand’s topsoil (by 193 million tonnes annually), while despoiling its streams, rivers, lakes and land with cancer-causing nitrates that will make it difficult for farmers to transition to other crops. New Zealand is also a major contributor to deforestation in South East Asia owing to the two million tonnes of palm kernel it imports per year (for its supposedly “grass fed” dairy herds).

Health researchers estimate high nitrate concentrations in drinking water are linked to 800,000 new bowel cancer cases every year.

Despite research showing milk-based calcium doesn’t reduce fractures,* Fonterra heavily markets milk as an essential source of calcium. Even more worrying research documents a link between high estrogen levels in milk** and higher rates of breast and prostate cancer. High milk intake is also linked to chronic digestive and skin problems in many non-European populations (including New Zealand Māori), who lack the enzyme necessary (lactase) to digest lactose (milk sugar).

Milk is heavily marketed to Māori, who have highest level of milk consumption in the world – and 80% more prostate cancer than New Zealand Europeans. Ironically Fonterra also heavily markets their dairy exports to China, India and South East Asia, where nearly 100% of residents also lack the ability to digest lactose.

Fonterra officials refused to to be interviewed for this documentary. However numerous farmers, including a representative of Federated Farmers, were willing to talk to Hurawai.  Despite working from 3:30 am to 7 pm seven days a week, New Zealand’s dairy farmers are struggling to repay roughly $38 billion of debt. Totally demoralized by increasing costs for fuel, fertilizer and palm kernel, 167 have committed suicide in the past ten years.

Hurawai also interviews several former dairy farmers who have escaped the rat race by transitioning to new crops. The most promising seems to be hemp. Although hemp absorbs four times as much CO2 as pine, the New Zealand government (owing to heavy Fonterra lobbying), refuses to open its carbon emission trading scheme to hemp farmers.

The end of the film suggests that New Zealand farmers may be forced to transition away from dairy if Silicon Valley successfully scales up its ability to produce milk and other dairy products cheaply via fermentation (with genetically modified bacteria). As natural dairy products are far more expensive to produce, this could collapse New Zealand’s dairy industry over night.

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*Including one study showing that fractures increase with higher calcium intake.

**A lactating cow produces high levels of estrogen.

**China mainly imports milk powder from New Zealand, which it uses in infant formula. This enables new mothers to migrate from rural China to work in urban factories, while their infants are cared for by older family members in their villages.

Film can be viewed free at Water Bear: https://join.waterbear.com/milked

 

Hot Air: Corporate Corruption New Zealand-Style

Hot Air: Climate Change Politics in New Zealand

Directed by Alistair Barry Abi King-Jones (2013)

Film Review

This documentary left me with a sick, futile feeling about the hopelessness of real democracy occurring any time soon in New Zealand. It tells the really sad tale of wealthy business interests aggressively blocking meaningful action on emissions reduction for over 30 years.

I was previously unaware that in 1990 the incoming National (conservative) government set a target of reducing NZ’s carbon emissions by 20% in 10 years. Alarmed by data being released by international climate scientists, National’s Minister of the Environment Simon Upton persuaded cabinet to agree to a $10/tonne carbon tax. His plan was to implement the tax in 1997, if polluting industries failed to achieve voluntary emissions targets.

In 1993, Upton established a board of inquiry to hear the resource consent for the Stratford (Taranaki) Power Station. The final consent mandated that Electrocorps plant 5,000 trees per year to mitigate the additional CO2 emissions produced by the power station. Not a single tree would be planted, after  Taranaki Regional Council used their powers under the Resource Management Act (RMA) to remove this stipulation.

When Upton launched the Working Group on Climate Policy (WOGOCOP), New Zealand’s Business Roundtable (under the guidance of Carter Holt Harvey*) quietly arranged for US climate denier Fred Singer (to to tour New Zealand.

The company’s next move was to form the Greenhouse Policy Coalition with New Zealand Steel, Coldco (a company specializing in refrigeration which has since been liquidated), Melbourne Cement and the New Zealand Oil Refining Company. Through massive lobbying, this Coalition successfully blocked each and every regulation aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

By 1996, when New Zealand enacted an MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) voting system, New Zealand’s per capita carbon emission were 7% higher than 1990 (and higher than most other industrialized countries).

In 1997 New Zealand signed the Kyoto treaty, committing New Zealand to reduce carbon emissions 5% from 1990 levels by 2012. It would be two years before Parliament ratified the treaty, after a Labour-led coalition under Helen Clark assumed control of government. At this point, the dairy cooperative Fontera and Tiwai Point aluminum manufacturer joined the pro-corporate Greenhouse Policy Commission in commissioning a statistically flawed Institute of Economic Research study. It claimed a carbon tax would reduce New Zealand GDP by 1%.

Under the New Labour government, Contact Energy received approval for a new gas-fired power plant and Genesis Energy a permit to increase coal burning (and carbon emissions) at their Huntley power plant. During the same period, Fonterra massively increased their use of coal (and their emissions) to dry milk solids (for export to China).

In 2005, New Zealand’s richest man Graeme Hart bought Carter Holt Harvey and began pulling down the company’s forests to replace them with dairy farms. Under Kyoto, this represented a potential cost to NZ taxpayers of $68 million (for disestablishing the carbon credits they had committed to).

Until 2006 when Al Gore released his film The Inconvenient Truth, Labour Environment Minister Pete Hodgson essentially carried the climate change issue alone – with the Green Party, Greenpeace, and other New Zealand environmental groups only signing on after 2006.

In lieu of a carbon tax, the Labour-led coalition, with the support of the National Party, opted to join the global Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)* in in 2008. The same year, National would resume control of government, withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.

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*Carter Holt Harvey specializes in forest plantation management and timber production.

**Under NZ’s ETS, the biggest polluters (outside of agriculture, which is exempt), can purchase credits to produce carbon emissions by investing in carbon sequestration schemes in the Third World. It has proved totally useless in preventing the continuing rise of our country’s carbon emissions. See link The Carbon Trading Racket

The film can be viewed free at https://www.hotairfilm.co.nz/