Threat posed to meat

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32589, 24 April 1971, Page 19

Threat posed to meat

The commercial production of high-quality synthetic meats might be imminent, Professor B. J. Ross, professor of agidcultural economics at Lincoln College, told a farm conference at Waimate this week.

It was partly as a result of the erosion of the prices of wool and butter by synthetics that meat was now New Zealand’s largest single export, he said. The development of syn-

thetic meat had been very rapid in the last five years or so in particular the United States and Japan. And as New Zealand saw Japan as a potential market for meat and her possible saviour if meat imports into an enlarged European Economic Community should be restricted, the development of attractive synthetic meats would have far-reaching consequences, particularly to manufacturing-grade mutton. The slow growth of demand for this country’s products in the United Kingdom emphasised that New Zealand’s problems would not disappear if Britain should fail to enter the Common Market. CO-ORDINATION NEEDED

Using large industrial companies as an analogy Professor Ross said that the sale of any one commodity overseas should be co-ordinated to achieve maximum returns; promotion had to be geared to stock on hand, preferably with the organisation carrying out the publicity also being responsible for delivery to the distributors. “To me, the best solution seems to be control of our exports by marketing authorities, along the lines of the Dairy Board, but any moves towards greater co-ordina-tion should be beneficial, and for this reason I welcome the moves towards co-opera-tion between the meat firms selling in Japan.” While he doubted very much if limited liability companies would become significant in New Zealand farming in the foreseeable future, Professor Ross said if the industry was to be relatively prosperous nothing was more certain than that the economic size of farms would have to go on rising. The interesting thing about the tendency to larger farms in the United States had been that the vast majority of these were family farms. These could be thought of as the end product of a period in which young, efficient and successful farmers had bought out their neighbours—the farming equivalent of industrial take-overs and mergers.

Investigations made by a research student at Lincoln College had shown that in one county of Canterbury substantially more than half

of recent sales had been amalgamations. Of the present state of farming, Professor Ross said that the first concern of the industry was to see that the rate of inflation was brought below 5 per cent as soon as possible. Only if this happened would the industry remain viable without assistance.

Investment in the industry also must be made profitable. Only if production was increasing was the individual farmer likely to be able to keep his income rising in line with the rest of the community, and only if total farm production was increasing was the nation likely to find the additional exports it needed to sustain real economic growth, for the benefit of all.