Meat Board to pursue sheepmeats acquisition

Press, 1 July 1983, Page 2

Meat Board to pursue sheepmeats acquisition

Farm editor The Meat Board is determined to press ahead with its sheepmeats acquisition system and this will be the basis of its submission to the Meat Industry Task Force. The chairman of the board, Mr A. M. Begg, and some of its executive staff yesterday made a strong defence of present board policy, answering all critics and outlining its submission to the Task Force. But the acquisition policy has certainly not been without cost and Mr Begg said he expected the accumulated deficit in the Meat Industry Stabilisation Account to be about $3 per sheep nationally at the end of the current trading year. He had initially told the Dominion meat and wool section annual conference of Federated Farmers that he would not put a figure on the deficit but later gave the per sheep figure. Depending on the flock numbers used (50 million breeding ewes or 70 million total sheep) the deficit could be from $l5O million to $2lO million. At September 31, 1982 the accumulated deficit was $64.5 million. Mr Begg said he thought a good case could be made out that this deficit was a debt on the whole country, and not just farmers. He was raising the matter to

see if Federated Farmers would join an approach to the Government outlining such a case. The Meat Board had not yet done so, he said. The deficit was going to be substantial, he said, but it was not to be referred to as a loss because it was more in the nature of a supplement. Having just returned from an overseas trip, Mr Begg told the farmers that New Zealand was certainly going to be fighting for its continued access to the r E.E.C. with sheepmeats. But the main thrust of his address and those of the board’s general manager, Mr Jim Bremner, and the assistant general manager,

marketing, Mr Graeme Harrison, was a ringing defence of the board’s actions to date and a positive and optimistic outlook for the future. Mr Bremner outlined the major problems of the industry, including internal costs of processing, transport and shipping, quality control over processed sheepmeats and the hangover of what he called the destructive force of the company pooling system. He said pools had been in competition with one another for farmers’ business. When overseas prices had weakened pool marketers had immediately dropped their prices, working on the “first loss is the best loss” theory. “But what was good for the operator might not have been good for New Zealand,” he said. “If the marketing system is not changed then the future is going to be grim. “We have tried to the greatest degree possible to get industry co-operation on pricing policy, but it has not been possible.

“I must reluctantly say that the board must continue to own the product to get the optimum price and penetration,” Mr Bremner said. The Meat Board intends to ship 75,000 tonnes of meat from New Zealand in

the next seven weeks using 23 conventional ships in addition to its normal container shipping programme. Mr Harrison said New Zealand export meat stocks would be “back in balance” by the end of the year. He said the backlog initially created by reduced sales of lamb to the Middle East in 1982 was now cleared. Stocks had been cleared without pushing extra product onto the traditional lamb markets.

Mr Begg also said that the board had not had the full support of the industry. But on his tour to the United Kingdom he had not encountered any hositility. All the criticism which had been expressed had been constructive. Major retailers and importing agents had endorsed the board’s pricing policy, with perhaps two exceptions in each group.