Agri Lobby and Eco Activist share endangered species role after New York takeover of moral movement

New Zealand’s farm lobby Federated Farmers once enjoyed a visibility and even power equal to that of the nation’s two main political parties, the Labour Party and National Party.

The lobby’s leader was a household name, and their intervention in any issue affecting farmers to any degree at all was accompanied by fear and trembling on one side or the other.

Yet now that New Zealand’s underpinning economic activity, farming, faces an ideological version of the Great Depression, and is known to do so, the lobby is eerily quiet on the public pulpit.

In institutional ecological husbandry terms the position of Federated Farmers curiously resembles that of Greenpeace.

Greenpeace until quite recently had the final word on everything in its domain.

Then it found itself shouldered aside by the United Nations takeover of the climate business in much the same way as Federated Farmers in its turn found itself eclipsed by the effects of the same intervention.

Federated Farmers successfully managed several earlier panics.

It quietly managed the red meat scare.

It then deftly handled the Food Miles concocted angst.

The ideological climate one keeps slipping out of its grasp.

Federated Farmers is in good company. The National Party the farmers’ party for instance. National knows an ants nest when it sees one, and thus it administers the hysteria merely a gentle kick from time to time.

It knows as Federated Farmers knows that putting a stick into it will stimulate the soldier ants dwelling inside carrying their latest millennialist doomsday computer modelled forecasts.

Farmers sell through agents and brokers and thus their circles are limited to other farmers and this has allowed to arise a false sense of security about their medium term prospects as the major designated villain in the emissions political panic.

Farmers convince themselves of the reasonableness of the coalition government and thus they fail to see that a large chunk of it seeks to appeal not to domestic wealth creators, but to the United Nations and that this is the reason for all the exulting about being “the first” with the emissions regime

The two most trafficked words in the current political lexicon are conversation and explain.

So why does Federated Farmers fail to publicly “explain” itself in the “conversation?”

The short answer is that it fears its presence will serve merely to inflame a fervour that remains immune to anything but catastrophizing on the capacity of the nation’s ruminants to contribute to the reflective canopy that we are told bounces back the sun’s rays to the surface of planet Earth.

Federated Farmers president Katie Milne (pictured) has but one option and it is to fire up her own base, and all those who rely on it for their livelihood: the stock & station fraternity, the merchandising cooperatives, along with the wider supplier community.

Other avenues are closed off. Traditional media which proved so helpful in calming the red meat excitement has taken a collective oath of allegiance to the United Nations- line and this was demonstrated by the mainstream’s awkward effusiveness in adhering to the recent UN-sponsored climate week.

Localised social media obediently chimed in too thus sealing off the sector entirely.

Federated Farmers is unfashionable which is why it is being so pointedly scorned by whole categories which once leaped to do its bidding.

Its own party, National, shows signs of hanging onto the sides of the same electoral climate bandwagon, a tendency only curbed by the knowledge that such exuberance would spur the Green-Labour component of the governing coalition to seek to outpace it with still more supercharged enthusiasm.

In New Zealand politics it is now the fame and renown overseas that matters and especially so in climate cult strongholds as New York and Paris.

A publicly sidelined Federated Farmers must now activate its own substantial base and thus reveal that it recognises and confronts the existential threat to its members and thus the ability of the nation to thrive.

Curious as it sounds Federated Farmers and Greenpeace hew to not dissimilar pastoral principles especially in regard to preservation and development of animals.

The arrival of a top down intervention on the scale of the United Nations climate drive has left both organisations overtaken and in an unaccustomed shade. Even on the endangered species list.