Private meat exporters’ controls not needed?

Press, 30 June 1983, Page 3

Private meat exporters’ controls not needed?

Farm editor Controls that have been imposed on meat exporters working in the traditional private enterprise competitive marketplace should be removed, said the chairman of the Dominion meat and wool section of Federated Farmers, Mr T. P. Plummer, yesterday. This did not mean that exporters did not have to act responsibly, he told the annual conference of the Dominion meat and wool section in Wellington. He had returned from a recent trip to the United Kingdom with the firm belief that prospects for selling 160,000 to 180,000 tonnes of sheepmeat annually in the years to come were good. This was provided that New Zealand did not over-supply the market at any one time, sold in the months when domestic lamb was not plentiful, and did not restrict any avenues of distribution, including importers.

“But rather we should set specific guidelines and marketing criteria upon those exporters wishing to export to that market,” he said. However, Mr Plummer’s address highlighted the dil-

emma facing the annual conference, which has to formulate a submission on export meat marketing to put before the present meat task force inquiry. The dilemma is how to have controls on, say, weak selling or market over-sup-ply or even pricing levels, and yet retain the advantages of private-enterprise selling.

With submissions to the task force due to be lodged today, a planned in-commit-tee discussion of the meat and wool section’s approach to the future of the meat industry is bound to be difficult.

Several provinces have already indicated that they support even more wholeheartedly than Mr Plummer a return to free, private enterprise. But a large section would prefer to endorse the intervention of the Meat Board during the last year. Mr Plummer also forcibly referred to the ‘world-owes-us-a-living” attitude which he said was still too prevalent. All New Zealanders had to be awake to the realities of the international marketplace, he said.