Sheep meat now short

Press, 25 September 1987, Page 1

Sheep meat now short

By DAVID CLARKSON

New Zealand has a shortage of sheepmeat and the Minister of Overseas Trade and Marketing, Mr Moore, hopes that will push up the international price. “We will get proper payment for what we produce,” he said. “I am going to enjoy that in the next two years.” The shortage had been confirmed in a meeting with meat industry officials on Wednesday, he said. It meant New Zealand could cut back on orders from some traditional buyers, who had been paying low prices. “It is not on for the New Zealand taxpayer to subsidise the Moscow housewife or some oil-rich kingdoms,” he said.

That had been happening three years ago under the system of supplementary minimum prices and monopoly control of the meat Industry. In a freezing works at Belfast, in his electorate, sheepmeat was then being rendered down into fertiliser because there was no market for it

“The farmers were happy, some freezing works jobs were saved temporarily, but that denied reality,” Mr Moore said. The industry had now been adjusted to face the new world.

“Now, with the pressure on prices and product there are people who will be chasing New Zealand sheepmeaL and they will be paying for it,” Mr Moore told an audience of 120 international marketing students at the University of Canterbury yesterday. Mr Moore said negotiations on both agricultural trade and trade in services were equally important to New Zealand in the coming round of talks in Geneva on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Agricultural trade, which was excluded from the 1947 G.A.T.T., was now being discussed for the first time, and there had been “substantial progress.” American and European Community position papers on agricultural trade reform would be part of the negotiating round. The opportunities for New Zealand were “awesome,” Mr Moore said.

At present 3 per cent of the world’s dairy production was tradeable. If that could be increased just one percentage point, and if New Zealand could hold its share, this would mean another $2.6 billion in yearly export earnings, and another 29,000 jobs for New Zealand.