Lesson 5: Global Trade — Export Markets & Protecting Mānuka
Tracing the export journey from hive to global market, evaluating counterfeit honey threats, and defending indigenous IP rights.
Ngā Whāinga Akoranga — Learning Intentions
Map global honey supply chains, evaluate the legal and cultural debate surrounding the Mānuka trademark, and synthesise learning in an enterprise capstone.
Whakataukī | Traditional Wisdom
“Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini.”
My strength is not that of one, but the strength of many.
Te Whakatakotoranga | Run of show
Tirohanga Whānui | What this lesson is doing
The unit ends where its money does — offshore. Students follow the jar out of the country, meet the counterfeiting problem that follows any premium product, and then hit the question the whole unit has been walking toward: mānuka is a Māori word, and it is now a trading name worth a great deal. Who is entitled to use it?
This is live and contested, in courts and between countries, and it is not settled by this lesson. That is a feature. Students have spent four lessons learning to ask who is entitled to a claim and who pays when a cost is not counted. Here they apply it to an argument that adults have not finished having.
You'll need
- Devices for the Act 2 research task — one per group minimum. This lesson has a lookup at its centre and does not work without it.
- The labels students made in Lesson 4.
- Board space for the supply chain in Act 1.
- Check the current state of the trademark dispute yourself before teaching. It moves. See Sources and checking.
Do Now — More sold than made 8 min
What it is: A counterfeiting hook that students can reason out without being told the answer.
Run it
- Pose the puzzle (2 min): "Around the world, far more honey is sold labelled mānuka than New Zealand produces in a year. How is that possible?"
- Collect explanations (4 min): in pairs. Expect: it is fake; it is diluted; it is a different plant; the word is being used loosely; someone is relabelling. All of these are real mechanisms, and students generate them unaided.
- Sort by fixability (2 min): which of those could a producer stop on their own, and which would need a rule that applies to everyone? Almost none are fixable alone. Point at the whakataukī and move on.
Keep the framing honest
Resist turning this into "other countries cheat". Dilution and mislabelling happen inside every premium food industry, including at home, and some overseas producers are making a genuine argument rather than a dishonest one — which Act 2 takes seriously. The problem is that a valuable word is hard to police, not that foreigners are dishonest.
Act 1 — Hive to shelf 15 min
What it is: Students map the export chain and find where value is added and where it leaks.
Run it
- Build the chain (5 min): groups lay out the steps from hive to an overseas shelf — hive site, extraction, testing and certification, packing, freight, customs and import rules, distributor, retailer, buyer. Order matters; let groups argue about it.
- Mark the value (4 min): at each step, write who gets paid. Students notice quickly that several steps happen after the honey leaves New Zealand.
- Find the weak links (4 min): circle every point where a jar could be diluted, relabelled or substituted without the buyer knowing. There are more than students expect, and most are far from the hive.
- The producer's problem (2 min): "You did everything right at your end. Where can it still go wrong, and what power do you actually have there?" This sets up Act 2 — the answer is a rule about the name, enforced by someone else.
| Step | Who verifies it | How a jar could go wrong here |
|---|---|---|
| Hive site and harvest | The producer, and their records | Honey from a different source blended in |
| Testing and certification | The certifying body | Untested honey sold with certification language it does not hold |
| Freight and customs | Exporter and border rules | Documents that do not match the contents |
| Overseas repacking | Often nobody the producer can see | Diluted, or the name applied to different honey entirely |
| Retail shelf | The buyer, reading a label | A claim the buyer has no way to check |
Act 2 — Who owns a word? 18 min
What it is: The core of the lesson. A live dispute, researched by students rather than summarised by the teacher.
Run it
- Set out what is not in dispute (3 min): mānuka is a te reo Māori word. The plant grows in Aotearoa. It also grows in Australia, where related species are used to make honey that is also sold as manuka. New Zealand producers have sought legal protection so that only New Zealand honey can be sold under the name. Those four facts are the whole setup.
- Research task (7 min): groups find out what has actually happened — who applied for protection, in which countries, and what has been decided so far. Require a source and a date for every finding. Groups will return different states of play; compare them and ask which source is most recent and most authoritative.
- Three arguments, stated fairly (5 min): assign each group one position and make
them state it at its strongest, in one sentence:
- New Zealand producers: the reputation, the testing regime and the market were built here; letting anyone use the name destroys the value for everyone.
- Australian producers: the plant grows here too and we have used the word for decades; a country cannot own a common product name.
- Māori: it is a Māori word for a plant with a whakapapa and a place in rongoā; if it is going to be owned by anyone, the question of Māori rights in it comes first — and that is not the same question as which country exports it.
- The point that matters (3 min): notice the third position is not a version of the first. "New Zealand should own it" and "Māori have rights in it" are different claims, and the second one is often folded into the first without being answered. Ask students who would have to be at the table for it to be answered properly.
Do not resolve it
Students will want a verdict. The honest answer is that this is being argued in more than one country, positions have shifted, and the Māori rights question runs through the Waitangi Tribunal's Wai 262 claim rather than through trademark law alone. If you give a verdict, give the date you are speaking as of, and expect it to age.
Act 3 — Capstone: the case for your enterprise 15 min
What it is: The unit's capstone. Students defend the enterprise they built in Lesson 4 against everything the unit has raised.
Run it
- Set the task (2 min): your enterprise is applying to sell overseas. Make the case in four parts — what you sell, what you can prove, what it costs the three baskets, and what right you have to the name on the jar.
- Prepare (7 min): groups work from their Lesson 4 label and Lesson 3 ledger. Every claim must be traceable to something in the unit.
- Present and challenge (6 min): each group presents for one minute; the class gets one challenge question each, and it must come from the unit — a cost not counted, a claim not checkable, a permission not obtained. Groups answer or concede. Conceding well is a good outcome.
Synthesise — Where value came from 6 min
Run it
- Take the question down (3 min): Lesson 1's question has been on the board for five lessons. Answer it as a class, in one sentence, out loud. Expect something like: value came from the plant, the bees and the work — and from knowledge, proof, and the right to the name.
- The last move (3 min): ask which of those can be taken away by someone else. The plant cannot. The name can. That is why the last lesson of an enterprise unit is about a word.
Exit ticket 4 min
One paragraph: if you had to decide who may use the word mānuka on a jar of honey, what would you decide and who would you have to consult before deciding?
Mark the second half. A student who names the parties — producers here and overseas, Māori as holders of the word and the mātauranga, the buyers who rely on it — has understood the lesson, whatever they decided.
Ngā Huarahi Ako | Differentiation
Tautoko / Support
- Give the Act 1 chain as pre-written cards to put in order, rather than generating the steps.
- For Act 2, supply one vetted source per group instead of open research, and keep the task to "what does this source say, and when was it written?"
- Accept the exit ticket as a list of who to consult, without the decision.
Toitoi / Extension
- Find another product whose name is tied to a place — champagne, feta, basmati, Kalamata. How is that protected, and would the same mechanism work for mānuka? What is different about a name that comes from an indigenous language?
- Read about the Wai 262 claim and report what it asked for. Does trademark law answer it?
- Work out who benefits financially if the name is restricted to New Zealand honey — and check whether Māori producers are among them in proportion to their claim on the word.
Te reo Māori
- Kupu: mānuka · taonga · mātauranga · tino rangatiratanga · kaitiaki · whakapapa.
- The macron is not decoration. Mānuka and manuka are the same word written with and without its long vowel — and which spelling appears on an overseas jar is itself part of the argument. Worth noticing out loud.
Mātauranga Māori | The question underneath the trade dispute
It is easy to teach this lesson as New Zealand versus Australia, because that is how it is usually reported and it makes a tidy debate. It is also the version that quietly removes Māori from a dispute about a Māori word.
The deeper claim is older than the honey industry. Wai 262 — the Waitangi Tribunal claim commonly called the flora and fauna claim, reported on in Ko Aotearoa Tēnei — asked what rights Māori hold in indigenous species, in te reo Māori, and in mātauranga Māori. Mānuka sits inside all three at once: a native plant, a Māori word, and a body of knowledge about its use that long predates any export market.
So there are two questions stacked on top of each other, and only one of them is a trade question. "Should New Zealand have exclusive use of the name?" is about export income. "What rights do Māori have in a Māori word for a Māori taonga?" is about te Tiriti, and it is not answered by winning the first. Students who can separate those two questions have got the most valuable thing in this unit.
Hononga Marautanga | Curriculum
Export income is generated by selling goods internationally and attracting overseas visitors (tourism).
Te Mātaiaho (2025) · Social Sciences · Phase 3 · Economic Activity · statement id 51120
The statement is straightforward and true, and this lesson adds the condition it does not mention: export income depends on the buyer being able to trust the label. Students finish able to state how export income is generated and to explain why a single contested word can put a whole category of it at risk — which is a more useful piece of economics than the sentence alone.
Sources and checking
- The trademark dispute is live and this page does not state its outcome on purpose. Applications have been made in several countries, decisions have gone different ways, and some have been appealed. Check the current position before you teach it — the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (iponz.govt.nz) and current news coverage are the places to look. Teaching a stale verdict with confidence is exactly the failure this unit spends five lessons warning students about.
- Wai 262 / Ko Aotearoa Tēnei — the Waitangi Tribunal's report on Māori rights in indigenous flora and fauna, te reo Māori and mātauranga Māori. Available through the Waitangi Tribunal (waitangitribunal.govt.nz). Read at least the summary before teaching Act 2 — it is the ground the third position stands on.
- The "more sold than produced" claim in the Do Now is framed as a puzzle, not a statistic, and no figure is given. If you want to quote a number, find a current source and quote it with its date and author; the estimates vary and are contested.
- Comparable protected names — champagne, feta, basmati — are well documented and make the extension task concrete. The instructive difference is that those protect a place, while mānuka also involves a language and a people.