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ACROSS THE DITCH Is China the new SEAFOOD MARKET? BY JOHN MOSIG 'day Kiwi. How're you travelling over there? I heard it's been a bit dry lately. Us too. Hottest and driest summer on record. We got conned into buying a couple of lotus bulbs for our goldfish pond a few years back. This summer was the first time it had been hot enough for long enough to trigger a bloom in five years. Then we had our first full-blown twister just before Easter. Ripped the rooves off over a hundred houses and totalled dozens of caravans along the Murray. Not to mention denuding the riverside forest along the way. I sure hope it's human activities that are causing this climate change, because if it's not, were in more trouble than the dinosaurs. Linked to that in a way is something that I came across the other day. You see, driven by a whirlwind expansion of the global economy, climate change is placing an exponentially increasing exploitation of global resources, a by-product of which is pollution. We've all seen the footage of the visible pollution in other parts of the world. The huge dumps around – and with the growth of the urban areas – in Asian cities. Air pollution is only the tip of the iceberg. Leaching into the aquifers of industrial and domestic contaminants is a huge threat to habitat sustainability. And once these chemical and heavy metal contaminants are in the food chain, they're nigh on impossible to remove. You see, what I heard was that educated Chinese – and they're the ones with the disposable income – are becoming quite discerning. They are looking for imported food items, especially seafood. That's right, the inheritors of the Forbidden City are G Aussie seafood on display in Hong Kong A rare lily 12 ■ NZ AQUACULTURE ■ MAY/JUNE 2013 ignoring the price and looking for quality. Don't get too excited. It hasn't translated into a rush of orders.Things don't move that fast. But it's a straw in the wind, eh? They've had a few recalls of Chinese food items. The one we heard the most about was the milk additive scandal, and, given the level of visible pollution, there'll have been others that haven't made the mainstream news down here. So what does this mean for us Antipodeans, with our clean green image? As long as we can maintain that image and produce and consistently deliver a quality product, we have to be in there with a good chance of expanding our market share, wouldn't you think? So that makes the protection of our environment crucial to our market image. What are your pollies doing about it? Ours aren't doing terribly much. Well, that's not quite right. They're doing a lot, like opening pristine environmental areas for mining. The rationale is that it creates jobs. And after all, the Australian Labour Party has a 60 percent constitutional bias towards the union movement that set it up in 1891. Set it up to look after the interests of Aussie workers. Of course they're going to want to create jobs. Good on 'em. However, they still see the farmer as the station owner whose sheep they had to shear under primitive and harsh conditions for what they considered insufficient reward. Sadly, it was not always a harmonious relationship. Maybe one day we'll get an enlightened visionary as our environment minister, but right now that doesn't seem to be an option. Our alternate government is all about the economy too, although more focussed on the profits being taken out of the endeavour by management rather than labour interests. Which translates to the same thing as we've already got. Ironically, as much as the environmental movement has derided farmers as ecological vandals, they, the farmers, are the custodians of the land. And as much as farmers have scoffed at the Green Taliban element of the green movement, they're the best allies we've got when it comes to keeping at bay those who would turn our farming waters into marine parks and recreational zones without consideration of the third factor that should govern these sorts of whole community decisions as to shared use – the economic benefits. After all, the best way to protect anything is to give it an intrinsic value. When you come to think of it scientifically, water runs downhill. One way or another, poor land management practices finish up in the drink. And that's where we farm. When I get talking to greenies, even the seemingly enlightened ones, I find that they really have a scant understanding of aquaculture, and the role it plays in the environment. If we're going to work out a sustainable compromise for the whole community, the farmer and the greeny must be friends.