I.W.S. reorganisation held most important

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33034, 29 September 1972, Page 6

I.W.S. reorganisation held most important

In the 25 years that he has been on the Wool Board, including 12 of them as chairman, Sir John Acland believes that the most significant thing that has happened has been the reorganisation of the International Wool Secretariat in 1960.

The secretariat is, of course, the organisation in which growers of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, and more recently Uruguay, have been associated in promotion, research, product development and technical service in support of wool.

Sir John, who resigned earlier in the month from the chairmanship of the board, said last week that back in 1960 there was talk among a section of growers in Australia that their country should pull out of the secretariat and work on its own, and but for the reorganisation at that stage he said that the organisation could have broken up, which would not have been in the best interests of wool. Soon after the reorganisation, under which the secretariat had been given a new constitution and its board had been expanded from six to 13, he recalled that Mr W. J. Vines had been appointed managing director, and as a result of his foresight the Woolmark scheme had been launched and the need for much more money to put wool in the forefront of fibres had been realised. Since then an organisation had been developed with between 200 and 300 technical people working from laboratories in Britain, Europe, the United States and Japan in influencing the textile industry throughout the world in the interests of wooL

Sir John gives a great deal of credit to the International Wool Secretariat and to the board’s own technical staff for the way that the market for the country’s crossbred carpet-

type wools have recovered. He recalls that up until the 1960 s very little promotion work had been carried out in support of carpet wools, in that most of these wools came from countries outside those which belonged to the secretariat. India was the country of origin of a lot of the carpet wools used in the United States. But then one of those things happened which could not be foreseen and indeed about that time the board learnt a salutary lesson about advising growers what sort of wool to grow. It had hardly finished telling them that if they continued producing more second-shear wools there might not be an outlet for them, when in 1958 India imposed a ban on the export of carpet wools and at the same time the United

States removed tariffs on the importation of these wools so providing an out-

let for the very wools that the board had been warning growers about.

As a consequence of this experience it is little wonder that Sir John has been cautious in recent years when he has been under pressure from growers seeking some sign from the “powers-that-be” as to what sort of wool they should grow. He has often been heard saying that they should grow the sort of wool that best suits their country. In any case carpet mills in the United States started to turn to New Zealand wools and now that country depends on New Zealand for about 57 per cent of its carpet wool and European and English mills have also followed suit.

However, some years ago Sir John became concerned that a big percentage of carpets was going to be produced on the tufted system by people who were not traditional carpet makers and who were rather converters of yarns into a finished product. For these people the artificial fibre provided a convenient and dependable source of raw material and it was obvious that something was going to have to be done to encourage these people to use wool if wool was not to miss out in the race. Sir John says that obviously a great deal of organisation was needed to do this but it was greatly to the credit of people both in the I.W.S. and in New Zealand that there were now teams going around, particularly in Europe, advising textile people about the types of wool that they should use. It was to them that the credit must go for a threefold expansion in the use of wool in carpets in Western Europe in only a recent three year period—from 3.9 m kilograms in 1968 to 10.5 m kilograms in 1971.

He just could not see the New Zealand wool industry working without the I.W.S. Sir John said.

For instance, in helping to get machine washability of woollen products into manufacturing the sec-

retariat was now providing luuunnes to manufacturers for which they would pay later. It was not known what wools were going to be used on this equipment and it was something that it was not possible to visualise each of the three countries going into individually. The I.W.S. had also been responsible for developing a notable method of conferring flame resistance on wool that had been instrumental in holding markets for wool in the United States. It was being used for New Zealand’s benefit in carpets. Likewise the secretariat had also been involved in the development and application of the process of artificially crimping wools for use in carpets, something that could be very much to New Zealand's advantage. Sir John said he believed that the Wool Research Organisation, in collaboration with the 1.W.5., had also made an important contribution to the upsurge in scouring that had been a feature of the wool industry in New Zealand in recent years. Also there was Woolmark, which was probably the greatest single development in the interests of wool giving it a trademark and. at the same time protecting the consumer. It was impossible to conceive this sort of thing being done by an individual country.

However, if in due course all three countries —Australia, South Africa and New Zealand — had wool marketing corporations there would no doubt have to be some alterations to the constitution of the secretariat. It could well be that each of the three countries could do more in giving technical assistance to industry in support of their own wools, but there would still have to be close co-operation with the secretariat, and indeed individual countries might get the secretariat to do this for them.

“It is my view that the woolgrowers in our three countries must continue to work as a team in the promotion of our fibre,” he says. “We have enough problems with the chemical companies and synthetic fibres without us also having to compete with other woolgrowers.”

Over a great deal of the time that Sir John Acland has been chairman of the board it has been concerned with marketing reform and Sir John recently recalled how he personally had become interested in this. In 1963 he was in the United States seeking to interest carpet manufacturers in using New Zealand wools. He went to the Chicago carpet fair where manufacturers were showing the ranges of carpets that were going to be available in the next few months and were ready to take orders from the selling trade for them. But within six months of that time Sir John says that these people were having to pay half as much again for their wool and above values on which they had based the prices of their finished products. This brought home to him the need to look at fluctuations in wool prices and this eventually led to the setting up of the wool marketing study group, which was the first of a series of investigations into wool marketing in recent years. And Sir John noted that it was not low prices but high prices and the risk that they could result in the loss of markets that had, in fact, sparked off this whole thing.

“I do not think that we will ever get complete stability into wool prices,” he says, “But I think we have got to try and get some stability.”

Sir John said he would agree that some of the. people in the trade between the grower and the manufacturer did take some of the bumps out of price movements, but the fact remained that in moving round mil! people this price fluctuation factor was of great concern to them. Sir John said he had had cause to remind manufacturers and also merchants that it was not the growers who were the authors of price fluctuations but those who purchased the wool and made the price.

Naturally any discussion with Sir John about his experience of recent years must turn eventually to the great 700,000 bale buy-in by the Wool Commission in the 1966-67 and 1967-68 seasons and the attempt to hold a floor price against all comers. He seems a little sad that at the time Australia was not also operating a floor price scheme. Had it been doing so he believes that the wool marketing picture would be very different from what It is today. Had Australia been on the scene then with a floor price he feels that a little extra stability might have been added to the market and buyers might have known that they could not obtain wools cheaper elsewhere. But this was not to be.

In retrospect he says that

the New Zealand floor price for crossbred wools could have been a little too high but at the time he said that no-one actually said it was and of course he recalled that in June, 1966, not long before the crash in wool prices began the International Wool Textile Organisation had appealed for an increase in wool production. Had Australia also had a floor price and there been consultations then between the two countries on their support levels, he says that there might have been a different relativity between coarse and finer wools. But he still thinks that the right thing was done at the time. If the Wool Commission had not held the wool he says that someone else would have and it was better that it should be the commission which had fed it back on to the market in a regulated way. And if the commission had not intervened and taken a lot of wool off the market he adds who knows to what levels wool prices might have fallen?

Since Australia has had a wool commission he says that the staffs of the commissions of the three countries have had an understanding of what each other is doing and obviously such collaboration must go on in the future, but he does not foresee the day when the grower countries will all hand their wool over to some sort of international agency to market for them. Sir John says that one of the great compensations of the job that has taken him to Europe about twice a year and has involved him in about a million miles of air travel has been the great many friends he has made in many nationalities. Among these have been Mr Schilling, a German, and Dr Lombardi, an Italian, who were both former presidents of the International Wool Textile Organisation, United States textile manufacturers and also woolgrowers like Messrs Keith Sexton, J. Bourke and B. Wilson, the late Dr J. G. van der Vath, a former chairman of the South African Wool Board, Sir William Gunn, the strong man who has dominated the Australian wool scene for the last decade and Mr W.

J. Vines, to whom Sir John said that woolgrowers owed a great debt—a man with great foresight and drive and a tremendous personality. He added that he had also made many interesting contacts when he had headed an I.W.S. delegation to Brazil, Uruguay, the Argentine, Chile and Peru.

And he added that he should not forget the many friends he had made in New Zealand and the good relationships that had existed with buyers, brokers and merchants although naturally they had had differences of opinion.

One of the things in recent years that had given him particular pleasure had been the voluntary association of buyers, wool merchants, freezing companies, stock and station agents, Interlaine, representing European wool users, and the British Wool Federation in the Wool Freight Council to negotiate freight rates with the shipping lines. Of particular pleasure was the fact that this year they had actually been able to negotiate a reduction in rates.

He had also been pleased that the board had been able to encourage a number of people in the scientific field in New Zealand to work in the interests of the sheep industry through bursaries and scholarships. Although he has given up the chairmanship of the board. Sir John will see out his present term on the board which expires in August next year.