Central Marketing Boards Favoured

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31016, 23 March 1966, Page 24

Central Marketing Boards Favoured

Current and future developments in the marketing of New Zealand’s agricultural exports suggest that there will be great advantages in the centralised marketing board approach. This is the conclusion reached by Professor B. P. Philpott, professor of ag-

rieultural economics at Lincoln College, and director of the Agricultural Economics Research Unit, in the latest unit publication entitled “strategic and tactical planning in international marketing policies.”

“Current arguments about ways of meeting the so-called

losses of the Meait Export Development Company, would not have been necessary if all New Zealand meat were to be sold through a centralised meat marketing board, operating in the same way as the New Zealand Dairy Board," said Professor Philpott. “Such a board would be concerned

with selling meat throughout the world, possibly at different prices, according to the market situation in different countries, but with the sole aim of maximising the total income earned from sale of meat and evening out the proceeds, to give an average payout to the New Zealand meat processing works, and to the New Zealand farmer, regardless of where the meat was sold.

“There are many other advantages which accrue to producer board marketing,” said Professor Philpott. “A board is better able than are private traders to act on forecasts of demand and prices for individual products. It can operate a pay-out policy, using price differentials, aimed at bringing forth the types of products required; for instance, a marketing board could, at the present time, encourage the production of beef and good-quality mutton, which are clearly products for which there is a strong market, but the production of which is not increasing because there is no incentive being offered; a marketing

board can more easily schedule supplies to different markets, earning different average returns, but similar marginal returns: and lastly, the trend towards centralisation and planning in overseas countries’ trading policies will possibly need to be matched by similar development in New Zealand.

“These potential advantages should not however, blind us to the many actual advantages of private enterprise marketing, particularly in respect to freedom from political pressure and accent on individual initiative and enterprise.” The publication discussed the role of price and market forecasting in the context of marketing agricultural products, and Professor Philpott saw a growing role for this type of economic research in the future, with the aim of introducing into agricultural marketing, the same sort of market research procedures which are now becoming common practice in industrial marketing. “Market projections and targets are also required as an indispensable complement to the production targets set by the Agricultural Development Conference, and the publication gives some interim results from the intensive programme of marketing research at present under way in the Agricultural Economics Research Unit,” said Professor Philpott