Edible Empire
Planet Pulse Pacific—your go-to podcast for conversations about people and planet—is proud to host a special series: Edible Empire.
As the climate and global health crises intensify, the need for meaningful change has never been more urgent. This six-episode series brings together leading voices from around the world to explore the concept of food imperialism, uncover the hidden social and environmental costs of what we eat, and examine how we can build a more just and sustainable food system.
Join your hosts, Ben Eitelberg and Emma Strutt, alongside special series co-host Dr Neal Haddaway, as they dive into the complex and often unseen world of food—how it is produced, traded, and consumed across the globe. Kelly Allum edits the series.
Edible Empire
Edible Empire: New Zealand dairy and Western Saharan phosphate
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This is episode 5 of a six-part series on food imperialism. Welcome to Edible Empire, a podcast by Planet Pulse Pacific about the hidden cost of our food.
Beyond recipes lies a story of power. From colonial plantations to modern agribusiness, this podcast reveals how the pursuit of food has redrawn maps, exploited people, and still shapes who holds control today.
This episode explores how New Zealand’s dairy industry links local landscapes to global extraction, ecological harm, and the wider machinery of food imperialism.
New Zealand’s image of clean, green pastures hides one of the world’s most intensive dairy industries. Behind each glass of milk there is a hidden web of global extraction: phosphate mined from occupied Western Sahara, palm kernel imported from deforested Southeast Asia, and polluted rivers flowing through Māori ancestral lands. This episode traces how New Zealand’s dairy boom reshapes both local ecosystems and distant economies, from illegally occupied territories in West Africa to political power in New Zealand. Through the story of “white gold”, we uncover how even the purest landscapes are bound into the machinery of food imperialism.
Here, we discuss the environmentally destructive and geopolitically fraught supply chains connecting intensive dairy production in Aotearoa New Zealand with phosphate mining in the illegally occupied territory of Western Sahara. Our three expert guests detail how New Zealand’s export-driven commodity model creates intense global market pressures for corporate profit and high-yield volume.
Freshwater ecologist Dr Mike Joy exposes the catastrophic local consequences of this system, explaining how excessive synthetic nitrogen and fertiliser inputs poison rivers, disrupt aquatic ecosystems, and contaminate drinking water.
Geographer Dr Milena Bojovic unpacks the structural traps forcing farmers into continual intensification, which in turn fuels a dependency on rare, internationally contested mineral resources.
Finally, researcher and artist Dr Crystall Bennes traces the physical journey of this phosphate rock, revealing how Western agricultural high yields rely heavily on wealth extracted under colonial conditions from the Boo Cra mine, highlighting the profound human and environmental costs borne by displaced Sahrawi populations.
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Resources from this episode:
- https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/pq/article/view/9629/8507
- https://people.wgtn.ac.nz/mike.joy
- https://www.gofundme.com/f/almasar-library-education-centre-for-children-and-women
- https://wsrw.org/en
- https://www.crystalbennes.com/
To view all the links to the websites and documents, visit the show notes on our website.
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