NZ Engine

Source: Radio New Zealand

The mayor of Central Hawke’s Bay says the region has been hit hard by back-to-back announcements of factory closures.

On Friday Heinz Wattie’s confirmed it would go ahead with shutting its frozen packing lines in Hastings, as well as manufacturing sites in Christchurch, Dunedin and Auckland.

The closures would affect about 300 jobs, although some people might be redeployed.

The decision came in the same week McCain Foods announced it would close its Hastings vegetable processing plant.

Central Hawke’s Bay Mayor Will Foley said it was a huge blow.

“It’s just come at a really bad time when there’s a lot of bad news happening out there and a lot of pressure on households and businesses already with increased costs, uncertainty and now you’ve got people’s jobs that are lost, and associated businesses that would’ve lost a lot of work as well directly for this supply chain,” he said.

“I guess we’re all sitting here wondering why what we think is a pretty good food producing region is struggling to produce and compete with imported food products. That’s what we need to get to the bottom of and work out why is that happening and what can we do to address it.”

Buy NZ Made, an organisation that supports Kiwi-made products, said the closures were a stark reminder of the mounting pressures local producers faced.

Executive director Dane Ambler said they were facing rising costs, weaker demand and competition with international firms.

“I think now is really the time to get behind local producers. I think we need much stronger and more deliberate backing of New Zealand made goods and services both by government and consumers,” he said.

“The government can go a long way to ensuring that local industries survive by basically changing procurement practices that prioritise local suppliers and targeted support. I don’t think that New Zealand made businesses have needed as much support as they need right now.”

Canterbury vegetable grower Alastair Clemens, who grew processed peas and carrots for Heinz Wattie’s in Barrhill, said the closures were devastating for growers.

“A lot of guys in our area grow processed peas, there might be 30 or 40 growers in our area that grow processed peas that had gone to the factory in the past, so that’s quite a hole left there that’s got to be filled up with something,” he said.

“Processed carrots have been a significant part of our rotation for quite a number of years, we’re sort of investigating other options for them.

“The area we’re in is good for root crops, potatoes and carrots and that sort of thing, so we’d like to think we could find something for that but it does leave a pretty big gap and it is pretty devastating really.”

Clemens said he might end up growing food for the dairy industry, or becoming one of the “many people who are converting to cows” because that was where the money and demand was at the moment.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Christchurch police are appealing for information after and aggravated robbery in the suburb of Hornby on Friday,

Detective Sergeant Rebecca Podmore said four masked people entered a store on Main South Road at about 7.30pm, stole items and fled in a car.

During the robbery, one staff member was assaulted and their arm was broken, she said.

They were taken to hospital in an ambulance.

The escape vehicle was later found in Ellesmere Road in Lincoln, but suspects have so far evaded police.

Police were urging anyone with information about the incident or the alleged offenders to come forward.

They were particularly seeking anyone who saw or has footage of a Grey Toyota Rav 4 around Main South Road between 7pm and 8pm Friday.

Information could be provided through the police 105 number or online, quoting the reference number 260327/8118, or anonymously through Crime Stoppers on 0800 555 111.

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Source: Radio New Zealand

New Zealand could be facing into a period of stagflation, economists are warning.

Stagflation describes a situation in which an economy experiences the unpleasant combination of high inflation, high unemployment and stagnant economic growth.

This could happen as a result of the Iran war because higher fuel prices are expected to create higher inflation, while the impact of those cost increases and the wider confidence blow could slow economic growth.

Mike Jones, chief economist at BNZ, said it was a “stagflationary-type shock” because it had hurt growth prospects and put pressure on people’s disposable incomes and business margins at the same time as it pushed up inflation.

“We’re also vulnerable given the economy going into this was only starting to find its feet,” he said.

“There are some buffers out there – most notably elevated commodity export prices and a falling NZ dollar – but it’s unlikely they will be enough to prevent a decent hit to the economy. I think, at this stage, it’s more a case of the recovery being disrupted or paused for a quarter or two, rather than being curtailed. So weaker growth but still growth.

“But there are still many scenarios in play. Much hangs on how long the conflict goes on for.”

Gareth Kiernan, chief forecaster at Infometrics, said stagflation was discussed as a prospect three or four years ago but did not happen.

“It was inflation followed by ‘we need a recession to rein that back in’.

“I feel like this time is a little bit different because it’s a supply shock that is, one, pushing up prices and, two, going to negatively impact growth.”

He said businesses had told him they had to pass on cost increases.

“I’m not talking about transport businesses putting up their prices. I’m talking about everybody who is using the transport services then being forced to put up their prices, because we’ve had an economy where for the last three years, it’s gone sideways. And people have been trimming and trimming, and there’s nothing left to trim.”

He said while the Reserve Bank expected fewer price increases to be passed on because there was less demand, that was not the full picture.

“Sure, there’s no demand, but you’re going to put your prices up rather than simply just go to the wall because you don’t have any money left.”

He said even if the situation were resolved immediately, there would be another up to four months of flow-on effects.

“Who knows where oil prices would settle… you wouldn’t expect them to probably go back to US$70 a barrel… there’s got to be more risk associated with that. But the longer it stretches on, the bigger the impact is in terms of just delaying or preventing the economic recovery.

“It’s almost a bit of a repeat of 2025 where we had the tariff situation hit us and knock confidence and therefore knock growth. And this is looking like the same again, except probably worse, to be fair.”

But Westpac’s chief economist Kelly Eckhold said he still expected some growth in the economy this year – although there was the potential for that to change.

“In the forecast update that we put out a couple of days ago, that assumed that things were going to get better within a month. If that doesn’t happen then things get darker quite quickly. Confidence levels about forecasts are quite low right now because there’s a lot of things we don’t know.

“You can’t discount the possibility [of less economic growth]. The only thing is that we are coming from a starting point where we were expecting a pretty solid year. So we’ve got further to fall before you get into that genuinely negative growth environment that we experienced back in 2024.”

The big concern was how long the conflict lasted, he said.

“We have to keep in mind that significant damage has already been done and it won’t be fixed quickly. There may also be risk premia built into concerns about fuel availability, prices… I’m very worried. I think this is a very, very serious situation.”

He said the lower exchange rate would make the price of imported goods higher, and make travel overseas more expensive for New Zealanders. But it was a positive for exporters.

“Nobody in New Zealand can protect us from the loss of standard of living that has come from this shock. The government can’t buy our way out of this. They can smooth the edges off for the most vulnerable. But in the end, it’s just a cost that is going to sheet home to us.

“The way out of this is by having the external sector ultimately be able to export our way out of this. And a lower exchange rate is part of the adjustment that facilitates that to occur.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Weather-hit regions are set to get a reprieve as warnings lift and the rain moves to other parts of the country.

The red heavy warning which had been in place for parts of Northland expired 4am on Friday, but the Far North and Whangārei remain under a state of emergency until Thursday.

MetService meteorologist Juliane Bergdolp said the deep sub-tropical low had moved to the east and many parts of the country were now in the clear.

“There is still some rain coming into the West Coast of [the] South Island and we still have some showers making their way into eastern parts of Bay of Plenty.”

Bergdolp said rain was expected to develop in the west of the South Island on Sunday, spreading to the west of the North Island on Saturday night or Sunday.

There were no rain or wind warnings in place for any regions.

Far North community member Mita Harris had been using a Unimog to help evacuate people and lift supplies as heavy rain hit the region. Harris said the storm did not last for long, but had impacted the region.

“This has been the biggest one this year so far, came in hard and fast – it was kind of a day or two and that was it, it was all over.

“The ground is saturated now and any more water coming in would certainly raise the levels quite quickly.”

Northland Civil Defence teams were assessing the damage after the latest storm.

Far North Mayor Moko Tepania said it would be a costly recovery with heavy rain and winds continuing as the low made its way across the country.

“This one is going to cost a lot of money to recover fully from both for us as a council with the infrastructure that we own and look after on behalf of the people but also for whanau themselves.”

Tepania said he was expecting the level of need to far exceed that of the January storms.

The Far North District Council said up to 410 cubic metres of floodwaters were flowing down the Awanui River every second – a level not seen since 1958.

Hundreds of people were evacuated in Kaitaia on Thursday night and more than 400 households and businesses were still without power on Friday morning after the heavy rain.

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Source: Radio New Zealand

Their story was intriguing: no tractors or cellphones, off-grid, subsistence and organic, relying on hand and bullock-power rather than fossil fuels to feed three generations of 25 people off a slip of land bounded by bush on the banks of the Whirinaki River.

So, with not a small measure of excitement, I found myself driving along a bumpy track leaving behind the main road through South Hokianga to meet the Land family.

Hmm – very timely, I thought, given the surging fuel crisis.

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“Part of our ethos here is to see how many people you can feed off a small piece of land,” Joseph Land told me as the family gathered in a cosy room lined with books and pictures.

“A policy of ours, or a value, is that once you start using fossil fuels, you actually use up more calories than you produce. So eventually that’s not going to sustain the world.”

They had motor vehicles “to stay integrated” but did not need fuel to farm, they explained.

The family’s Catholic faith and respect for Māori knowledge and values also infused their way of farming and living, Joseph said.

As members of the Catholic Worker Movement – founded in the 1930s out of the Great Depression – helping the poor and marginalised, farming communally, and pacifism, were principles they worked by.

Heavy farming work was done by a team of four bullocks, and Archie and Buster, two Clydesdale horses.

The rest of the work to feed four households – from about six hectares – was done by hand.

In a paddock over the river, a crop of maize stands tall, almost ready for harvest.

One of Joseph’s sons Abraham hitches up his team of bullocks to lightly till the soil of a bare strip nearby for planting lupins – good for nourishing the soil after the potato harvest.

“When I first got into bullocks, I thought two would be enough, and when they were about four years old, they weren’t really pulling as much as I wanted, so I got a couple more, but they kept on growing for another two years. There were six before they stopped. And so now I’ve got much more power than I need.”

The Lands grow olives and a variety of fruit and vegetables, graze a few sheep and cows, make their own butter and rely mostly on their staple maize crop which they kibble and grind for bread and porridge.

A few things are bought in like wheat flour, sugar, tea and coffee, with money earned from part-time work off the farm.

Daughter-in-law Marissa, for example, works as a nurse, to pay for extras for her household.

“Two days a week gives us more than enough money, bit too much money – to live off.”

She enjoyed being part of the community and said the family was anxious not to be seen as survivalist or “exclusionary”.

With homeschooling her three children, cooking, gardening and helping build their new cob house, with husband Patrick, it was busy 24/7, she said.

“It’s very physical. Yeah, it is. And there’s never a moment in which your job is done. There’s always something you think, ‘oh, I could, should, probably be doing’.”

The Land family’s roots here were laid by Peter and Judith Land who bought a block of bush in the 1970s.

Joseph’s parents had been teachers in Fiji and were inspired by their life in a Vanua Levu village to recreate a similar subsistence style of living, alongside their Catholic faith.

“Dad was a visionary, not practical,” Joseph said, pointing out a photo of his late father who lived here into his 90s.

He did, however, set up a power source from a nearby waterfall. Now the Lands have solar power for lighting and biogas and wood-fired ranges for cooking.

Marissa shows me how she grinds the maize by hand using a Corona mill after it is kibbled – the kernels removed from the cob – at another hand-powered machine in the farmyard.

The corncobs are stored in elevated storehouses nearby, like small hutches on stilts.

“They were everywhere in Hokianga, every farm had big gardens, small herds of cows, like 10 cows, big gardens, pig sties and lots of corn for animals and people,” Joseph said.

He arrived here as a boy and remembered when the roads were much quieter.

The local kaumatua taught him gardening skills including the knowledge needed for growing kūmara. He nurtures several heritage varieties on his kūmara tāpapa.

“You get really attached to the different varieties.

“I learned all this from the last gardens in Whirinaki in the ’70s. They vanished within five years, but I just got a glimpse of the lifestyle. So, a lot of this is just copying what was everyone’s experience here up until the ’70s.”

Joseph and his wife Catherine have seven grown children, four of whom have remained on the farm.

“It was very hard to get rid of me out of the valley,” Patrick said. “I did travel a little bit, but I just always wanted to be back here. Yeah, I find it very hard to be somewhere where you’re just eating food that you don’t know where it’s come from.”

Joseph is regarded as a kaikarakia among the local people, leading blessings and prayers and spending a lot of time at the local marae.

He told me the Land family acknowledged the mana whenua of the local hapū, and that the Lands stayed here by their goodwill.

“I think the big thing is having a mindset, this is our base economy, our life here, and so it’s real. What we grow we really depend on.”

Life was “full and rich”, however he acknowledged “come a disaster, we can go and get money and buy food”.

“So, in that way, we’re not as real as a peasant farmer in other parts of the world who don’t have those other options. But we don’t avail ourselves of that option. We don’t need to. We continue here. The average wage to us is enormous.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Red, bell-bottomed tomatoes with green crowns growing on sprawling vines in a glasshouse along Wellington’s south coast help keep Nina and her mother Teresa Cuccurullo connected to their heritage.

The Island Bay family has been growing tomatoes originally sourced from seeds brought over from the Italian island of Capri in the 1960s, for more than six decades.

It is a rich tradition first started by Teresa’s father Luigi Ruocco and carried on by her husband Antonio, before daughter Nina took it up after his death.

“It’s part of our history and it’s a time where you think about your grandparents,” Nina told Country Life. “I think about my father and [how] we are now getting it out to the rest of the community and to the family.

“It’s great to see how some of the younger people are starting to grow these tomatoes too, because then that legacy has continued.”

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Their family was part of the “chain migration” from Italy to the Wellington suburb of Island Bay last century, Nina explained.

“They were coming here to better themselves, to start new families,” she said. “Nonno was one of the early ones in the 1920s, but there were others before him that were here as well.”

She said the family maintained its Italian identity by gathering as a community through its Catholic faith, via the cultural group known as Club Garibaldi, or by keeping up with family traditions – like eating octopus and tomato salad at Christmas time.

Food is also key to feeding their heritage. Particularly growing tomatoes to be used to make passata.

“The sauce is central to all the other food because … that’s the sauce for the macaroni, it’s the sauce for the lasagna, the ravioli, the parmigiana. So the sauce is used quite a lot in the cooking and that’s why it was sort of bottled so it could be used during the year.”

Nina said the type of tomatoes they grew were “quite identifiable”, mostly through their distinctive shape.

“They’re an elongated shape, and they sort of go a little bit green at the top. There’s not much seeds in them, and they’re acid-free, and the skin is quite thin, so it’s not a thick skin.”

They harvest the seeds from each season’s crop to keep the variety alive – growing them in the glasshouse to avoid cross-pollination with other tomato varieties.

“We get the best tomatoes on the crop – the bigger ones,” Teresa told Country Life. “Let them ripen on the stem, bring them in, cut them, take out all the seeds that there are – it’s not many – and separate them.”

The seeds are then put through a sieve to separate them from the membrane before being placed on the window sill to dry for the next summer.

Nothing goes to waste, Teresa said.

“All the pieces that you’ve cut up to get the seeds, they can be made into a sauce.”

They share the seeds with friends, family and others in the wider community to help keep them going – and also sell small plants during the peak growing period.

Nina said it was a privilege to be able to continue the legacy first started by her grandfather, and carried on by her father.

She said he loved being out in the garden.

“As well as a vegetable gardener, he was a very good flower gardener.

“He had a lot of plants, up to about 60 inside the glass house, and then quite a few more outside. So he was kept very, very busy.

“It was a passion. He was happy there.”

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