Mr Lange to air dairy deal

Press, 20 January 1984, Page 5

Mr Lange to air dairy deal

NZPA staff correspondent Washington The Leader of the Opposition, Mr Lange, arrived in a snowy Washington from Los Angeles yesterday for talks over the next two days with Vice-President George Bush, the Secretary for Agriculture, Mr John Block, and senior Defence Department officials.

He will talk with other officials and go to the campaign headquarters of the Democrat presidential nomination front-runner, Walter Mondale, where he will be briefed on Mr Mondale’s foreign policy and the way Americans wage political wars. Mr Lange will visit the air and space museum, address the Asia Society, and see “Woman of the Year,” a show, starring Lauren Bacall, about the conflicting careers of a television journalist and her cartoonist husband.

With Mr Bush, Mr Lange said, he would bring up the United States plan to give butter and cheese to

Jamaica for sale on the commercial market there, a plan that threatens to destroy New Zealand’s 40-year-old $3 million a year dairy trade in Jamaica.

Mr Lange, who will meet Mr Bush for the first time, said, “I will be telling him that in respect of the United States trade partnership with New Zealand there is a commonly held view which transcends politics. It goes beyond political parties and is so basic to the interests of New Zealand that it would be wrong for the United States to assume that it was a matter of political infighting—it is not.”

The United States, “is the country from which we import the most ... the country to which we sell the most,” Mr Lange said. “It is the country which has the power to devastate our agricultural industries or co-operate with us in a more rational distribution of our agricultural production,” he said.

Mr Lange said that when he was much younger he worked for a meat company which exported products to Jamaica.

It was clearly not in the spirit of the friendship which existed between the United States and New Zealand for the butter and cheese deal to take place, he said.

At the Pentagon, Mr Lange will meet Mr Jim Kelly, the Defence Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Affairs, and will briefly meet Mr Richard Armitage, Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs.

Mr Lange said that he expected to talk about New Zealand and United States defence interests in the Pacific, including the A.N.Z.U.S. Pact, but that he hoped, too, that the Americans would brief him on “other theatres” and provide a broad overview of American military policy around the world.