KEY POINTS:
New Zealand has a great deal riding on the brand Fonterra, the farmers co-operative that markets our milk in the world. Not only our milk - Fonterra is a multinational, buying and processing milk in many countries.
It is one of the few global traders in an
industry that has lately returned this country's richest export earnings.
If Fonterra comes to grief anywhere it must expect the most critical scrutiny at home. Its association with fatally contaminated baby formula in China invites the most searching questions of the company here.
As a minority partner with China's largest producer of powdered milk, San Lu, why could Fonterra not ensure that the quality of locally sourced raw milk would be secure? Why did it not insist on tests for melamine, which had been used to disguise low protein in pet food in China last year?
Why, when it learned a baby had died and hundreds were sick, did it fail to convince San Lu to recall to product? Why did it wait for 12 days to alert the New Zealand Embassy?
And the embassy may be asked why it then took two weeks to report the problem to Wellington? A further week passed before the embassy was told to alert the Chinese authorities.
By now the number of sick babies has soared to more than 6000, including 158 with acute kidney failure, and the death toll has reached four. The contamination was not confined to San Lu products. All told, 21 companies' products have been found to contain melamine, a chemical intended for plastics and fertiliser, not food.
In China, where parents are now desperate for alternative infant sustenance, the problem is not blamed on Fonterra.
But elsewhere, particularly in English-speaking countries, the New Zealand firm's name has been associated with the food scandal.
It is a price the company pays for being the whistle-blower and facing the questions that follow.
It has managed to answer some of them. It knows of no dairy company in the world that tests for a chemical such as melamine that would have to be deliberately mixed in milk. Hindsight suggests the pet-food poisoning last year was a warning that could have been noticed. But hindsight is an unfair advantage.
It may be more reasonable to suggest that, given China's poor reputation for food quality control generally, a joint-venture investor should have been determined to ensure all levels of the chain of supply were known, reliable and monitored.
A fair view of Fonterra's handling of events also needs to recognise the culture in which the company is working there. China is not New Zealand. The criminal penalties for deliberate food contamination are considerably more serious. Culprits there may be executed. The stakes would have been life and death for its San Lu business associates.
Then there is the fierce sense of shame that may inhibit a response. Fonterra was taking a bold step for a foreign minority partner. A lapse of 12 days between the approach to San Lu and alerting the NZ Embassy is not long in the circumstances.
Those who urge cultural sensitivity on companies working in East Asia cannot demand that sensitivity should have been shelved for an emergency that, Fonterra's brand interest aside, was China's business.
Now Fonterra must repair the damage to its reputation in other places as best it can. And we hope that China has noted the role a global brand has played in bringing this crime to light.
If Fonterra had been operating there on its own, the products would have been recalled the day it learned they had been tainted. Such is the social value of brand marketing.
But as a foreign, minority partner in a different culture, Fonterra has found itself ethically and practically constrained. It was from that, imperfect, context that it eventually made its stand.
