Italy offers help on N.Z. butter

Press, 18 February 1980, Page 7

Italy offers help on N.Z. butter

NZPA Paris The influential Italian Farm Minister, Mr Giovanni Marcora, has pledged to prod the Common Market into positive action over the future of New Zealand’s vital butter sales in Europe. As president of the E.E.C.’s Council of Agriculture Ministers — his term will end in June — he has the power to “lead” the council in its decision-making. Mr Marcora has told the Minister of Overseas Trade (Mr Taiboys), that the New Zealand ’ issue, one of the most sensitive in a jungle of issues facing, the Common Market, is part of an “Italian package” that he wants completed before his presidency ends. The two Ministers met

in Rome before Mr Talboys came on to Paris for the resumed probe into the status of the Palestine Liberation Organisation at future International Monetary Fund meetings. Both Mr Taiboys and Mr, Marcora — and New Zealand dairy farmers — are waiting to see the shape of proposals the E.E.C.’s executive,, the commission, has drawn up for New Zealand's longterm butter supplies. Although widely thought to recommend a future annual tonnage of 90,000, compared with this year’s 115,000-tonne entitlement, the proposals have still not emerged publicly from the Brussels bureaucracy. Mr Marcora told Mr Taiboys he was on New Zealand’s side “by reasoning and logic.” Mr Taiboys

repeated his December view that there is “a goldmine of good will” in Rome towards the plight of New Zealand’s crucial primary trade. New Zealand’s needs, however justified and accepted politically, are not likely to be dealt with kindly by the council if on the same agenda it is faced with slapping cuts on Europe’s own farmers. If Mr Marcora is allowed to be as good as his word and keep New Zealand in an “Italian package,” it is almost inevitable that New Zealand’s future will be linked inextricably with the Market’s domestic woes. Mr Taiboys said that the key element lay in ensuring that the right proposal went to the council, and Mr Finn Olav Gundelach, the E.E.CL Agricultural Commissioner, is the man to influence that, not Mr Marcora. Mr Taiboys will not comment on the speculated figure of 90,000 tonnes in the long term and merely rests on the wellworn argument for this year’s level to be maintained. “What I am urging is that New Zealand needs, and is justified to have, something closer to the market than it now has,” he said. "After all, we have already come down from something like 180,000 tonnes a year in the last decade. “We are not just talking about pounds of butter: We are talking about the future economic health of our country,”'Mr Taiboys said.