Meat door kept open

Press, 1 June 1977, Page 3

Meat door kept open

The chairman of the New Zealand Meat Board (Mr Charles Hilgendorf) will go to Eastern Europe at the end of the week to make sure the door for New Zealand's mutton and beef remains open.

“The Soviet Union has bought from us in three of the last five years,” Mr Hilgendorf said yesterday. “It has been buying more regularly and there are straws in the wind it may be an even more regular buyer.” Mr Hilgendorf, now in

London during a four-week world tour, will spend a day in Warsaw and three days in Moscow.

He said he did not expect the Soviet Union to enter into long-term contracts with New Zealand suppliers, but thought there could be an arrangement under which the Russians would look first to New Zealand whenever they decided to import meat.

“It is working towards becoming an established market for us,” Mr Hilgendorf said.

Although Russian meat consumption, said to be 58kg a head annually, is not. high by Western standards (103 kg in New Zealand), most of the Soviet Union’s 260 million people like to eat meat, and regard it as the key to their living standards. New Zealand last year became the largest non-com-munist supplier, and the Russians are now New Zealand’s third-biggest customer, after Britain and the I United States.