Make wine, not homes: The new essential services

Wednesday, 25 March 2020

OPINION: It's sacrilege I know; but is winemaking really an essential service?

It's not self-evidently essential, like lamb chops and Janola. Though I accept that it does have morale-boosting properties that other supermarket staples lack, especially when you're stuck at home for at least four weeks.

But it's all a moot point really, because the Government says it's essential, and so are beer brewing and cider-making for that matter. And the production of packaging to sell those products and their transport.

With the undoubted requirement for fast and sweeping measures from the state it has suddenly become unpatriotic, even dangerous, to question its decisions. I will type carefully.

**READ MORE:

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* Coronavirus essential services: winemaking, brewing and others

* Coronavirus: Five shopping centres being closed by property manager Oyster Group**

Winemaking fits the principle that the Prime Minister laid out on Monday when she announced that we would shortly find ourselves in a level four lockdown to thwart the spread of coronavirus.

'Those who are part of the food supply chain, who provide for our supermarkets, are part of our essential primary industry,' she said.

What doesn't quite fit is the insistence that we're achieving this shutdown as completely as possible, with an absolute minimum of business activity.

And that's been the Government's mantra in imploring New Zealanders to accept the draconian rewriting of the rules of their lives and their finances.

As Paul Stocks, deputy chief executive of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), put it: 'We need as many businesses as possible to close their premises now if our one shot at beating the virus is to be successful.'

Another of his phrases was, 'only businesses absolutely essential to the necessities of life' would remain open.

Perhaps that explains the confusion early this week as businesses struggled to understand if they would remain open or be required to close.

Retailing giant The Warehouse made a public disclosure through the NZX to confirm its 92 stores would remain open.

But then Stocks said the Government had not decided the retailer could continue to operate and cautioned firms about assuming they would remain open before 'they've recieved that Government adjudication.'

The Warehouse is a publicly traded company, and was forced to halt trading.

It didn't inspire confidence in The Warehouse. But neither does it inspire confidence in MBIE, which appears to be broadly in charge of deciding who makes the essential services list.

It may surprise many New Zealanders that the necessities of life include a 2020 wine vintage, roughly 90 per cent of which is expected to be shipped, and sipped, abroad.

And to be clear, this is winemaking that involves a harvest that is currently under way. Pickers, for whom growers and vineyards are scrambling to make distancing provisions in meals and housing as well as on the job, are not yet halfway through this year's crop.

After that will come the less labour intensive fermentation, barrel aging, bottling and distribution.

It's a similar story for other crops coming off at the minute, apples and kiwifruit in particular. The growers of both are having to make similar provisions for their labourers. Even in this extraordinary year, harvesting is mainly done by transitory labourers not local to the area; their safe housing and sanitation is clearly more difficult to ensure than the ordinary population, making their risk for virus spread higher.

It's easy to simply say, as the Government is currently doing, that we're feeding the nation. But we are, in fact, doing something more complicated. Something that is vastly more difficult to distil in an urgent soundbite.

The overwhelming majority of New Zealand-produced food goes abroad. As a rule of thumb the figure is about 90 per cent for meat and crops, it's a little higher for milk.

So primarily, in continuing to grow, harvest, and process food we are feeding the world. We're also taking a bit more risk ourselves to do it.

We are also keeping foreign exchange earnings flowing to New Zealand while other industries are shutdown. Meat, dairy and fruit exports were worth about $18 billion dollars last year. 

That's a good thing in a time of global emergency. But in terms of fighting the spread of the virus it is also a compromise.

And it sits within an overarching system of decision-making that, for other sectors, has brooked no compromise.

Tens of millions of dollars worth of fresh food is about to spoil in restaurant refrigerators.

Builders have downed tools and left unfinished homes exposed to the oncoming winter weather, some have no roofs or cladding (full disclosure, one of them is mine). Our borders are closed.

No one is denying that Government decisions have needed to be fast and furious to get ahead of contagion. And, as people are now fond of saying, we are on wartime footing. But what is becoming clear too is that we're also embarking on wartime dissembling.