War Escalation

It depends on what kind of world you live in. If you think you live in a rules-based order where everyone gets to pick and choose what they want to do with whom, then yes, you get to select who your 40 million people are out of 9 billion and rather snootily go around the world and choose what will sell to you and not to you, etc., etc. What we're actually seeing, of course, against the current backdrop of an energy crisis, two major wars, worries about more, even if, as I said, World War III isn't looming, is country after country starting to talk about resilience and thinking about, OK, how can we minimize our import bill? How can we make sure as much of what we produce is as close to home as possible so we don't have to worry sending it by ship if those ships can't get fuel to sail all the way from New Zealand, et cetera, et cetera. So the environment in which you're selling that food is changing very dramatically. And while some doors are opening, for example, this one's food for fuel in Singapore and another one with India, which, by the way, the free trade deal also had a defense and technology adjunct to it. So in other words, it wasn't just about we want to sell you food. There was a quid pro quo geopolitically, which I fully expected to see. The environment is now much, much more politicized and New Zealand will have to be more cognizant of that. For example, going back one more time to the Singapore deal, it's very lucky that Singapore itself, as I said, is high up on the list of countries within Asia which are likely to get redirected fuel from the US. Now they can't get it from the Middle East. But what does that mean? Well, that means that Singapore will be listening to the US and that means New Zealand will be listening to Singapore who will be listening to the US. So the choices that one is making, one thinks completely freely in this rules based order are actually narrowing down all the time.