Napier, MSCNewsWire, Wednesday 1 June 2016 - World Milk Day, which is today, is sponsored by the United Nations. It will go unnoticed and un-celebrated in New Zealand and the reason is that nobody until now needed it or even noticed it and this includes the producers.

The milk picture in New Zealand has something in common with the timber industry here until the 1980s.

Then it was an article of popular faith that New Zealand was a major force, perhaps even the major force, in the world timber industry.

It’s centrepiece, Forest Products Ltd, was regarded with the same awe that came to be later bestowed upon Fonterra.

The man at the head of Forest Products, Sir Reginald Smythe, for example, was regarded with the same quasi mystical reverence that came to settle on the head of the chief of Fonterra.

In the event Forest Products was at best a third division player in the world forestry sector.

New Zealand remains a mid field presence in the world dairy sector.

The two industries’ commonality and unique distinguishing point remains in the production and exports per head of population and this remains especially so in the dairy sector.

Back now to World Milk Day.. No point in the world’s biggest per capita exporter of milk encouraging internal consumption at the expense of the balance of payments. In other words drinking itself out of its own living.

Even more than the timber industry that until the 1980s was slated as the wooden walls of the nation’s economy, the dairy industry was the result of an extended, massive and united national effort that was quite literally a cooperative one.

One of its hallmarks was the Dairy Research Institute at Massey University which was absorbed into Fonterra in 2001, which was also the kick off date for the FAO’s World Milk Day, always on June 1.

The DRI was the high temple for the intense quality standards drive that today still underpins the nation’s clean-green branding campaign.

Now the dairy sector resembles the forestry sector at the cusp of the 1980s/90s in that the mood of buoyant exaltation has been replaced by an equal contrary aura of doom and despair.

This current mood conjures up a notion of the lavish and mysteriously sited immense Fonterra building in the middle of Auckland and alongside the Westhaven Marina carrying the same lost-civilisation impression as does the old stark and still equally modernist headquarters of Forest Products in Penrose.

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