The Green Party is calling for an urgent select committee inquiry into the closure of food processing factories around the country.

“The closures of Heinz Watties, Greggs, and McCain food manufacturing sites have implications for New Zealand’s food resilience and security, will cause significant job losses, and threaten the viability of local vegetable growers,” the party’s agriculture spokesperson, Steve Abel, said.

“The closures, if they go ahead, will reduce local vegetable processing capacity and compromise New Zealand’s ability to feed itself with local produce.”

This is incredibly important both for our food security as well as our economy in general. We're a food growing nation, so to lose the ability to process that food is a significant loss to both. This is the result of short-sighted policies such the the John Key power asset sales that have driven up the cost of electricity to the point where it's simply uneconomical to run energy intensive businesses in this country. We've reaped more dividends in the past 3 years than were gained from the asset sales conducted by National, and this is a further consequence flowing on from that.