Good future for food industry in New Zealand

Press, 20 July 1979, Page 9

Good future for food industry in New Zealand

i. New Zealand meat producers will have a decided * advantage over their com- » petitors in the 1990 s as * the price of gram for stock J foods follows the escalat?ing cost of oil. Professor James Duncan, ; chairman of the Commission for the Future, told a ' seminar of the nutrition . department of the Univer- * Sity of Otago that this •> would make it much more 5 expensive for American * and European farmers to J continue to feed grain to i cattle and other livestock. * “Our pasture-fed stock .< will produce relatively •j cheap meat,” he said. * “We also have abundant < .opportunity to diversify into soft fruit, berry fruits, nuts and other crops,” said Professor Duncan. “Our dairy exporters will find protectionist markets increasingly difficult to penetrate, although new and quite large markets will develop around the basin.” • Professor Duncan said that two opposing trends in eating habits were becoming evident world wide. The first was the int creasing popularity of packaged instant food and the second was the fashion for natural foodstuffs, which was largely motivated by the desire to avoid the additives used in instant foods. “Of course, poisonous materials are also present in natural products,” he said. “There is seratonin in bananas, oxalic acid in tea and rhubarb and solanine in potatoes. But these are considered to be more acceptable and controllable by the individual

than the additives in processed products.” This trend would continue to effect the commercial market, he said.

“We could make additional export earnings in the future by preserving foods, by making them into secondary products like

sausages, pies and confections or by the rapid transport to overseas markets of fresh fruits, such as strawberries or

blueberries,” said Professor Duncan. “It is also probable that the shortage of protein throughout the world, both for human and animal consumption, will make the production of single-cell protein from natural gas, and edible protein from grass more attractive,” he said. “Other possible sources of protein include possum, alfalfa termites, lizards, grasshoppers and snakes,” said Professor Duncan. “For intance, I could give you quite a tasty recipe for crickets called 'Chocolate Chirpies.’ But the number of people indulging in these is not likely to be very large.” “The coming world-wide shortage of food has led the United States National Research Council to explore possible new sources of food,” said Professor Duncan. “They have identified 24 possible new sources of food from tropical including grains, fruits, vegetables, oils, nuts and edible algae.” Among the more interesting new foods were mangosteen and custard almond fruit from South East Asia, naranjiUa from South America and algae from Lake Chad in Africa. “The big challenge for our future is to create new industries which are both labour-intensive and competitive, as we are likely to have a lot of surplus manpower,” said Professor Duncan.

“It seems to me that the food industry is in an excellent position to take up this challenge,” he said. “We have the opportunity to capture markets for instant foods in the affluent nations and also to develop new forms of protein for the Asian market. “The fo.od industry should have plenty of hope for the future,” he concluded.