Breaking a trans-Tasman treaty

by Tim Wilson, July 4, 2011

Last year SD spoke at the New Zealand Food and Grocery Council’s annual conference about a range of public policy challenges that affect both the developed and developing world. One key issue was the continuing focus of government’s to separately label palm oil.

Since then the Australian Parliament has voted to separately label palm oil in a political capitulation to populist Senator, Nick Xenophon.

Interestingly now the New Zealand Food and Grocery Council has announced that they think it breaks a bilateral treaty between Australia and New Zealand. We suspect they’re correct since most Australians don’t even think to consider their obligations to those across the Tasman.

While bilateral treaty obligations are important, they are not the real reason this Bill should be junked. The real reason is the livelihoods of millions in the developing world who’ll pay the costs of rich-world snobbery who ignore that part of sustainable environmental development is sustainable economic development as well. If the opportunities for the poor to lift themselves out of poverty disappear they don’t take it, they just shift to other avenues, often which are less efficient, more costly and consumer more of the world’s scarce resources than the first option.

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