‘Premium’ space the place to be

01-07-2010 | Jackie Harrigan

The recessionary environment of the past few years combined with projections for world population growth have put agriculture and food production at the forefront of international thinking, says Agriculture Director-General Murray Sherwin.

Sherwin is back from Washington after working with agencies including the World Bank and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation on productivity and future sustainability.

In the New Zealand context, "agriculture matters", he told delegates at the Agricultural and Horticultural Outlook Forum in Wellington. "... Because if we're going to grow this little economy of ours, it's productivity growth that matters, and a sector as big as the primary industries had better be really pumping well. It's what drives our competitiveness as a nation, it's what drives the profitability of our enterprises, and it's what ultimately delivers rising living standards. So it matters a lot."

NZ is not in a position to feed the world, despite projections showing an increasing gap between world food production and human demand.

"We keep forgetting just how small a producer we are," Sherwin said. "I mean, even our biggest industry - dairy - accounts for 2.7% of world production. So we're tiny; we hardly count. And we don't do grains, and for feeding the billions it's going to be the grains that matter."

Instead, the place for NZ is as a "source of high-quality, customer focused, trusted animal proteins".

As Iain Jager, of Zespri, put it: "As an issue of competitive strategy, as a Western country at the bottom of the Pacific, with high land and labour costs, far from our major markets, the ‘premium' space is where we must be."

Jager explained it was about selling "connections, not commodities ... We don't sell kiwifruit, we sell Zespri kiwifruit which is about health and vitality and energy and life. We don't sell meat, we sell Angus Pure."

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