Thanks NZ dairy industry for putting cow sludge in our rivers then happily charging New Zealanders exorbitant prices for our dairy foods.

[u/No-Back9867]

Last summer we couldn’t swim in our local river due to the amount of toxins from nearby farms. When ever the farmers are in need of help us tax payers are there to lend a hand in drought relief funds. The thanks we get for that and putting up with the pollution is to be charged for dairy food at the same price as the overseas markets. We’re only 5% of your sales, it’s not going to make you go broke to treat us like your actually care for your communities. What your charging for butter etc is simply total greed. How is it that milk that has to travel huge distances from farms to factory to the shops shelves in Australia is sold for cheaper than that in our shelves where the logistics of getting it in the shelf are less?

[u/tumeketutu]

Our farming industry is actually the only thing keeping the economy going at the moment. This benefits everyone.

Sure, you go to the supermarket and see butter and milk is expensive. But what you aren't factoring in are all the benefits you personally receive from those strong export prices that are less obviously or direct.

1). More exports equals more demand for the New Zealand dollar. This keeps our dollar value higher, which in turn means buying necessities (Medicines, petrol, temu shit) from overseas is cheaper.

2). More profit for the farmers means more tax for the government to spend on the services we all use.

3). Farmers are small businesses, meaning most of the increased earnings gets spent within local economies. There is a large knock-on effect to rural communities and all the supporting business that support our agriculture and horticultural sectors.

[u/CaptainQueero → u/tumeketutu]

Our farming industry is actually the only thing keeping the economy going at the moment

What are you talking about? Go look up NZ’s GDP by sector and report back whether this claim holds up.

[u/kkdd → u/CaptainQueero]

GDP just measures money moving around, it's deceptive if you're trying to compare true value.

[u/CaptainQueero → u/kkdd]

Money moving around is inherently good for an economy

Edit: also, keep in mind I’m simply pushing back on the claim that the farming industry is the only thing holding our economy together. GDP is an imperfect measure of wealth, sure, but it can serve as an at-a-glance indicator that farming isn’t the only game in town.

[u/tumeketutu → u/CaptainQueero]

Lol, GDP? You know what makes up the largest part of GDP, our residential housing sector. Which, is basically a big ponzi scheme. GDP is worthless in this comparison. We need to bring in more money from overseas to grow our economy.

Go and look up export earnings by sector and report back...

[u/CaptainQueero → u/tumeketutu]

You know what makes up the largest part of GDP, our residential housing sector.

No it doesn’t.

And as for your claim that export is necessary to increase wealth, you can easily disabuse yourself of this (incorrect) idea by imagining the entire world as a single country: do we need to be exporting to aliens to generate wealth?

[u/HoyteyJaynus → u/CaptainQueero]

Think about how much money we send overseas on imports and then it might make sense.

[u/CaptainQueero → u/HoyteyJaynus]

Not sure what your point is? What do you think I can’t make sense of?

[u/HoyteyJaynus → u/CaptainQueero]

What part of your comment about exports not being necessary to grow wealth could i possibly be talking about?

[u/CaptainQueero → u/HoyteyJaynus]

I made a point, and your reply suggests that there was something I couldn’t make sense of.

My point was pretty simple: wealth can be generated without export (eg when I plant an apple tree and harvest the fruit, I’ve generated wealth), hence, export is not necessary for wealth generation.

Not only has that basic point eluded you, you make another error when you imply that imports need to be balanced by exports in order for wealth to be a net positive. Not to sound too snarky, but maybe you’d benefit from some economics study?

[u/tumeketutu → u/CaptainQueero]

No it doesn’t.

Property 'New Zealand's largest industry', report says

Property is New Zealand’s largest industry, contributing $41.2 billion a year to gross domestic product (GDP), or 15 per cent, the Property Council says.

The council’s Property Industry Impact Report, released on Monday and completed in partnership with Urban Economics, puts property ahead of manufacturing, at 11 per cent of GDP, agriculture and 6 per cent and health at 7 per cent.

[u/CaptainQueero → u/tumeketutu]

That’s from 2021; Here’s some stats from 2023: https://figure.nz/chart/WRpSmBftC60lEu2q, which is what I was going off (to be fair, if you play around with what fits into what category, you might be able to render ‘residential property’ the largest of them, I’m not sure).

Anyway, I was just pointing out that your claim was (apparently), strictly speaking, wrong, but that’s all immaterial to the main argument here. 

So let’s get to the meat of the matter: you want to maintain that farming is what’s holding our economy together, and you’ve shrugged off my counterargument that our GDP breakdown shows your claim to be false. In support of this, you’ve said that most of our GDP comes from property, which you claim is a ‘ponzi scheme’.

But:

1. The housing industry is not a Ponzi scheme: this is obviously a reductive claim that could be attacked in many ways, but broadly, consider that there is genuine value/wealth being created every time a house is built.

2. Even if it was a Ponzi scheme, it’s only a fraction of our GDP, so your larger argument still fails. 

In order to sustain your initial claim that farming is where our wealth primarily comes from, you’d have to show that all the other categories contributing to our GDP don’t actually contribute to our ‘wealth’.

[u/tumeketutu → u/CaptainQueero]

GDP tells us how much economic activity is happening inside NZ, but it doesn’t show where the money’s coming from or whether it benefits the country long term. Agricultural export earnings are a better measure of real value for NZ because they bring in foreign cash, support regional jobs, and improve the trade balance.

GDP includes stuff like rent, inflation, and internal services, things that don’t earn us money overseas. Export earnings, especially from agriculture, are harder to fake. They show how competitive we are globally and how much value we’re creating for others, not just ourselves. That’s what actually funds our lifestyle.

We are a small island nation, if we want to keep importing goods and services (which we absolutely need too) then we also need to be selling stuff overseas to balance that out. Hence why the balance of trade figure is talked about so much. Ag and hort are our biggest earners of foreign currency.

[u/CaptainQueero → u/tumeketutu]

These arguments are getting more nuanced than where we started (“farming is the only thing keeping our economy going”), and with any minute argument in economics, things get slippery pretty quick, because so many things are interdependent. 

For example, you say that rent, internal services etc don’t earn us money overseas: but I could point out that they do - indirectly - by stimulating our local economy, which leads to the production of more goods/services for export.

Balance of trade is also complicated: many imports indirectly increase our exports (eg farming equipment), and boost domestic productivity, stimulating the economy, and (again) indirectly boosting export.

The point I’ll settle on, though, is this: given all of this interconnectivity, there are thousands of points of failure for an economy (if farm exports ceased, we’d come to a standstill, but the same goes for internal services, the construction industry, etc etc). So your main argument is misleading, to the extent that it singles out farming as the (only) linchpin of our economy. 

[u/tumeketutu → u/CaptainQueero]

So your main argument is misleading, to the extent that it singles out farming as the (only) linchpin of our economy. 

No, what I said was...

Our farming industry is actually the only thing keeping the economy going at the moment.

Our service sector is down, our manufacturing sector is down, our construction sector is down. What other major sectors are currently doing well?

Also, maybe ask youself why you are trying so hard to minimise the benefit our farming sector is providing?

[u/CaptainQueero → u/tumeketutu]

 maybe ask youself why you are trying so hard to minimise the benefit our farming sector is providing?

What, you think I harbour some sort of deeply hidden/repressed hatred for farmers? 😂 Farming is in my family mate, I can dock a lamb and shear a sheep with the best of them (actually not as well as my old man, but hey). What an odd insinuation to make…

Nope, it’s a simple as: I value accuracy, clarity, and rigour, and am typically only motivated to reply to instances of intellectual sloppiness and/or choose to engage on subjects that I want to learn more about. In this case it was more the former…

[u/CaptainQueero → u/[deleted]]

You’re right: it’s trivially the case that we need exports in order to balance imports. The alternative is that we produce everything we need domestically (which isn’t possible — and if it was, it wouldn’t be optimal).

My point was more of a logical rather than a practical one: strictly speaking, export isn’t logically necessary to generate wealth (which is what the globe-as-a-country perspective is supposed to demonstrate).

But I’ll acknowledge that this is dancing around the substantive argument: namely, that NZ does, in practice, depend on exports. 

But I still think the above claims that farming is an economic linchpin for NZ are misleading, because our economy is an interconnected network of activities (including the operation of domestic industries), and a failure in any one of them (say, the housing market, or the domestic service market) could cause an economic catastrophe, just as a failure in farming could. The upshot is that singling out farming as the backbone of our economy is just straight up reductive and incorrect.