A 7.5-magnitude earthquake hit South Island last night, causing houses to collapse and ground breaking, causing huge economic losses to local people. To make matters worse, it has been confirmed that two people were killed in the earthquake.
What is really worrying is the damage and long-term impact of the earthquake on New Zealand`s economy as a whole.
One of the hardest hit is the dairy industry, one of New Zealand`s pillar industries.
In recent years, the dairy industry in New Zealand has been on the decline, dairy prices have been falling, dairy farmers cry, coupled with the continuous drought has made the cost of increasing, a large number of farmers have withdrawn from the dairy industry.
And the earthquake gave almost all of New Zealand`s dairy industry a deadly blow. Most of New Zealand`s dairy farms are known to be on South Island, and the epicenter of the earthquake covers the vast majority of dairy farms.
MichaelWoodward, a spokesman for Federated Farmers`s North Canterbury Dairy Company, said all dairy farms from the center of the source to the north of Kaikoura had been damaged, and farmers were now completely shut down.
A massive earthquake destroyed many power facilities, and all the dairy farms were out of power. Although some large dairy farms had their own backup generators, they could hardly last a few days on the back-up generators alone.
Even farms with backup generators shut down the farm`s water supply, which meant stopping production, because they knew that many electricity facilities were damaged and that electricity would not be available for a short period of time. They need to use only a small amount of electricity to preserve existing fresh milk.
Even so, the fresh milk may eventually be in danger of being dumped, as the earthquake cut off all road and sea shipments, which can only be kept for 24 hours under existing conditions on the farm. The dumping of large quantities of milk will cause another big blow to the farmers.
It`s time for cows to mate, and if the farm stops running now, it will affect milk production until next year, Woodward said.
The quake will also affect the exchange rate of the New Zealand dollar, which ASB economists say will not be significant, but today the New Zealand currency fell 1.5% against each currency and 2%, and the New Zealand currency fell 0.5% against the Austrian currency.
But others who have benefited from the earthquake, such as Fletcher Building Construction, have gained 2.7% in just a few hours, while TowerInsurance`s shares have fallen 8.2% in a matter of hours.
