pn888. National Emergencies - Cultural Ethics, Volunteerism and the Apple Industry

Apple in your hand

 If you've been watching NZTV, you may  have seen there could be a crisis in the apple-picking industry resulting in good apples rotting on the ground due to a shortage of apple pickers. There are too few seasonal workers from the Pacific Islanders due to Covid and apparently, too few Kiwis are prepared to work for the low wages.

Many people may say that's the growers' problem, not mine.  These rural types seem to think we owe them something.  In the good years growers and farmers keep the money to themselves and in bad years they call out for help. 

But I wonder. 

Is this our cutting down of tall poppies, and evidence of a deep urban-rural divide?  Is it really only their problem or should we see it as a shared problem, an incipient national emergency?   Wasted apples mean less income, less tax, fewer exports, a lower GNP.  There's a spin off effect, even as far off as less money to spend on education and hospitals.  Not to mention other human beings in need of our help.

In another country with a different and more community-focused cultural ethic government would mobilise the whole community to come to the aid of growers — and save all but the most rotten of the apples.

 In NZ, the individual preempts community except in wartime or during earthquakes and floods and other local or national emergencies.   

There are exeptions, of course. Volunteerism is not totally absent.  But it tends to be one-off, culture-specific, localised or small scale. Examples would include Māori helpers at tangi and the "occupiers" at Shelley Bay, Wellington,  and Ihumātao in Auckland, Canterbury university students helping during the Christchurch earthquake, primary school chlldren's tree planting, searches for missing people, especially missing children, organisers of amateur sports and clubs, Good Sorts and the Give a Little campaigns.  The recent Wellington protests  at Parliament is another example, however mistaken, of people giving up their time for a cause. Government-led examples include the use of the Army during the 1951 waterfront dispute and, more recently, our spirit of oneness during the early outbreak of Covid19.

It is not that we don't have the labour. There are literally hundreds, thousands  of people who would find the time to help, as volunteers or for the low wages offered, if they were motivated. If they saw the waste and understood its manifestations. If they empathised with the apple growers and saw the problem as a shared one. As a incipient national emergency. 

But how can they be motivated?

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-- ACW

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With a potential 23.2 million 18kg boxes destined for customers in more than 80 countries, a very good growing season so far has provided increased sized fruit with high sunshine and warmth giving fruit size, colour, and crispness.