Dear Editor, I don’t expect many of your readers will recall the supposedly import substitution focused Minister of Finance, Mark Brown two years ago urging people to support local businesses.

This prompted a letter from me published by you on 30 March 2020. The introductory paragraph read like this – “It was encouraging to hear the Minister of Finance urging consumers during these difficult times to support local businesses in order to sustain livelihoods and maintain business continuity and economic activity. I certainly hope that we will see this translate, where eggs are concerned, into a rationalisation of that market.”

You might in fact consider re-running the entire letter as it is a frightful indictment on the present CIP government which to the detriment of the local egg industry has actively encouraged, in its policies and actions, the flooding of the market with Fiji, Samoa and NZ eggs.

Which continues to this day.

With huge numbers of consumers being confined to their homes and unable to shop, Government compounds the harm by demonstrating its bias.

The Government funded welfare food packages programme must be a welcomed relief to many of those in lockdown and I have no problem with it.

My problem is that while this programme presented Government with an opportunity to dispel the evidence that it was overtly, and totally, engaged in the systematic dismantling of a once successful import substitution venture that its earlier predecessors had encouraged and supported, it once again showed us that it cannot be trusted and that it would not be deterred from the destructive path it was committed to.

It could have approached any one of the local producers to fill the egg component of the food parcels but made no such attempt. The smaller producers were probably not too bothered but Scott’s Farm’s unsold stock is building and will need to go to market with a special so keep an eye out for that.

The losses we sustain in that exercise will of course be added to the accumulating damages.  

John M Scott

Scott’s Farm