Too many lamb sellers

Press, 7 August 1981, Page 14

Too many lamb sellers

New Zealand needs to have fewer sellers of lamb on the British market. This is the view of the former chairman of the Meat Board, Sir Charles Hilgendorf, who has recently been in Britain.

In the last few years in Britain he said that buyers of the product had become fewer and therefore stronger, which was connected with the increase in supermarkets and the development of big chains of butcheries. On the other hand sellers of New Zealand lamb had not become fewer or any stronger, so that the relative position of the parties had moved in favour of the buyer. While it was true that bigness was not necessarily beautiful, it was also true that there were too many small wholesalers of New Zealand lamb on the British market.

There would always be a place for some small specialist operators serving particular markets, but it seemed to

many people that there should be five or six wholesalers who were able to serve the whole market for the whole of the year and who were prepared to put meat into store when necessary. This was the way it was felt the market should develop. This would not mean that there should be any reduction in the number of buyers in New Zealand but they would have to sell through one of the companies who were in the panel of wholesalers.

He said he realised that this might not be easy to achieve because some of the new exporters were farmerowned, but this did not mean that he did not think it was very important. If a new broom appeared on the political scene he or it might think that the only way to reform the system would be to have a single • seller, which Sir Charles said would in his opinion be the worst possible solution in Britain.