Our microbiologist writes ...

Subsidising the golden goose


In claiming that tourism is of no benefit to farmers (The Southland Times, July 3), is Federated Farmers' Mr Rod Pemberton inferring that tourists are not themselves consumers of farming produce?



Or might it be that the Feds are rather more mindful that tourists may take home with them troubling reports of a province at peril from unsustainable exploitation of resources and utilities at the expense of acquiescent communities? Reports of the insidious violation of a national estate, the wholesale destruction of hundreds of kilometres of established windbreaks and the toxic legacy of what once were this country's great waterways?



Indeed, we must not allow visitors to return home with stories of muddy excrement-encrusted roads beyond farm gates and a view that Southland is now rather more unclean and obscene than the reverse image we've long promoted. Or that the ordinary ratepayer must substantially subsidise compliance monitoring of a golden goose unwilling to pay its own way. Or even that, while ratepayers face threats of electricity and water shortages each year, many of Mr Pemberton's constituents use both with a selfish insatiability while expecting those who live beside them to pay export market prices for their produce.



If the Feds are forgiven future contributions to Venture Southland, it may well be more appropriate to suggest that farmers are of no benefit to tourism.

C D Hutchison, Lumsden
(Opinion: Southland Times 8 July)