Maybe it’s my DNA, my Irish roots, but I love potatoes. Agria, Red Rascals, Ilam Hardy…spuds rock. Christmas wouldn’t be complete without Oamaru Jersey Bennies. Our one billion dollar potato industry is a relatively intimate one, employing around five thousand people, in growing and processing. With year round harvesting, it’s a stable employer. And the industry deserves a fair go.

Enter the foreign fries, the frozen spuds to our shops, from Belguim and the Netherlands. Huge surplus inventories have spilled on to our shores, largely due to Covid-induced supply chain disruption. Global potato prices have collapsed and there’s a mountain of product in European cool stores.

But as you will have seen in the news, the allegation is that these Euro frozen potato products are being dumped here. And of course, being European, these spuds enjoy EU subsidies. A Dutch grower for example gets a 50 Euro subsidy per tonne.

But the material damage to our own homegrown industry from this dumping could be swift and severe, if the local industry is forced to compete on price.

The definition of dumping is when imported goods are sold at a price that is below their normal value in their country of export. Analysis from the industry body, Potatoes New Zealand, determines the dumping margins are anywhere between ninety five per cent and one hundred and fifty per cent – and rising. They want the government to impose an anti-dumping duty on these Euro potato products, to ensure demand for locally grown spuds can withstand the onslaught. The industry estimates the current situation will lead to local industry product being undercut by up to nearly fourty per cent, savaging our growers and processors. Production will be slashed, jobs fried.

So a dumping complaint is before MBIE. The maddening thing is that even if MBIE believes an investigation is warranted, they’re allowed to take nine long months to probe away, before applying a dumping duty. Beauacratic paralysis at its leisurely best. In the interim, lend the industry a hand. Spurn the foreign spuds. Buy local, from God’s own soil.