The Meat Board

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23129, 19 September 1940, Page 6

The Meat Board

Supporting the electoral college of the New Zealand Meat Producers' Board, the Ashburton Agricultural and Pastoral Association endorsed a reasonable complaint against the " severe "curtailment of the functions of the board " since the outbreak of war." It may not be a practical demand that the board should be the body responsible to the Minister for Marketing for "all matters relating to the frozen meat "export trade, including storage and shipping, "the disposal of meat and its by-products, and "the control of the freezing works." In\view of the terms under which New Zealand has contracted to sell meat to the British Ministry of Food and in view of the existence and present functions of the Marketing Department, this is, in fact, a request for the impossible. But it is both practical and necessary to ask that the Government and the Marketing Department should, to the fullest possible extent, work in co-operation and consultation with the board, which is its most serviceable and direct link with the industry and which has a vast store of knowledge and experience to draw upon. Moreover, after the war, the board will (or should) again resume its ordinary functions, and the more complete its present co-operation with the department, the more smoothly will that be done. The Minister, of course, has claimed that co-operation and consultation are already complete; but, as we have remarked previously, it is impossible to accept that assurance wholly. The most recent test of its value, when the chairman of the board stated that he had been unable to obtain essential information, may be cited. The Minister protested; he said that the chairman of the board had acknowledged that he had been misreported; but the chairman, in fact, had not been misreported, though misled into thinking that he had been, and hastened to reaffirm what he had said. The Government, truly or falsely, will create the clear impression that it intends the present control to remain and the board to be permanently side-tracked, unless relations between the department and the board are established on a basis of full confidence and cooperation.