How to convince a world concerned about the environmental impact of massive food miles to buy products from the opposite side of the globe? That's the magic question in the minds of many Kiwis at the moment, and the heat is on the NZ government to find solutions:

UK paper says ‘don’t buy NZ’

National Party Horticulture spokesman Craig Foss says the latest campaign in the UK against New Zealand produce is a very serious threat to our exports.

“The risk to our economy of such anti-New Zealand trade campaigns is massive. We have made so much progress beating ‘hard’ trade barriers and now the emerging threat of ‘soft’ trade barriers is before us.”

Mr Foss is commenting after learning that London newspaper ‘The Times’ has been running a monthly ‘Low Carbon Diet Masterplan’ series. This instructs consumers to ‘Buy a bottle of French wine instead of a New Zealand vintage’.“The Food Miles campaign shows that New Zealand must make sure it has its own environmental act together: We must have a credible climate change policy. Only then will we be able to convince overseas consumers that buying New Zealand produce is on the whole good for them and the environment.

“The current Government’s record on greenhouse gas emissions undermines New Zealand’s credibility as we attempt to counter the Food Miles campaign.” - Scoop

Short of hooking the island nation up to a convoy of tug boats and dragging it a little closer to their target market, this is a problem that's not going to disappear anytime soon. Of course, this issue applies not just to New Zealand, but international trade in all parts of the globe. We've spent decades setting up a globalised framework of trade - whilst ignoring the few lonely voices speaking out against it - and are now experiencing the economic vulnerabilities born of such specialised international interdependencies.