Mike's Minute: Here's what the Parliamentary briefing on food plant closures will show

The Primary Production Select Committee is going to have a look into, well, primary production. Namely, the Hawke’s Bay scenario of Heinz and McCain's, both of whom have announced closures and job losses.

A briefing is different to an inquiry, just in case you are thinking the committee is going to come up with something tangible.

This is the sort of sad handwringing we get into around bad news.

The simple truth is some industries are undercut by consumer choice. In this case, the consumer likes cheap, and the cheaper the better.

And part of the problem in first world countries is we like to pay people decent wages and that tends to add to the price.

Supermarkets invent home brands and those brands undercut brands like McCain. Peaches from China outsell peaches from Hawke’s Bay.

But here is the issue for the committee – I assume they know all this. I know all this because it's not hard to know.

So once they find all this out, they will also look at the impact on communities. I think I can help them here as well: it's not good.

People losing jobs do one of several things;

1) Stop working,

2) Find a new job,

3) Move out of town.

I note the two local mayors in Hawke’s Bay have welcomed the briefing. Brilliant, but my question is, how does that help?

No one likes any of this. We would all like Heinz and McCain to be thriving, but they are not.

I bet Americans would like farmers to buy more cows and raise more beef, but they aren't doing that either. So they buy our beef at ever-increasing prices.

Quality is a good game to be in, if you can sell it. It turns out in wine and beef and lamb, and maybe merino, we can. In peaches we can't.

So the places that host the factories, that grow the fruit or the trees, and the places that put them into things like cans, flounder or struggle until they fail.

Looking into a story told many times over, often in rural or provincial New Zealand, is not going to change a thing.

One of the mayors said this should get to the bottom of why this is happening. I think I just told you that and what can be done differently.

On that last part I wish them all the luck in the world.

Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.