If New Zealanders ate lamb as much as Australians do, then domestic consumption of sheep meat would provide farmers with their second biggest market after China, according to a new report.
But because New Zealanders like to eat chicken, beef or vegan products as well as lamb, the domestic market consumes only 5% of lamb production.
And the 95% of lamb that is exported is under threat from a drop off in demand from China and increased competition from Australia.
This has brought prices crashing down, according to the rural lender, Rabobank. Now they are trending back up again, and the chance of a big recovery in consumption might have been missed.
But there is no reason why lamb should not flourish in New Zealand, according to the high-profile chef, Martin Bosley. He concedes, though that it has lost the pre-eminent place it once had in New Zealand cuisine.
“It’s probably the most expensive protein at the supermarket right now,” Bosley says.
“I see other people picking up the packets of lamb, looking at the prices and putting them back in the fridge again.”
And it’s not just individual consumers who have this problem. Bosley says he went out to dinner at three restaurants in a week, and lamb wasn’t on the menu in a single one of them. He adds once common sheep meat side products like sweetbreads are often hard to find at the butcher’s shop. And he fears trends away from lamb have a way of bedding in, as lamb slowly loses its place in food culture.
“Once lamb starts to fall off the menus in restaurants and the dining halls at home, then another generation comes through which isn’t familiar with it and doesn’t know how to cook it.”
Bosley thinks that is a pity because lamb is a versatile protein, suitable to many cuisines besides the Sunday roast, such as dishes from the Mediterranean or curries from India. And it has a sustainable appeal as well – it often comes from farms just down the road, and so eating it can help the local economy and pay local wages.
“People need to see lamb being used in an everyday context, not as items on the menu of a high-brow restaurant. The Sunday roast is the thing we used to do and we could do it again, there could be a campaign to get people back around the table on a Sunday.”
But this has not so far happened, and the Rabobank report, called Watering the Green Shoots in New Zealand Sheep meat, goes on to say New Zealand domestic consumption of lamb is not even a quarter of the level in Australia.
“If Kiwis were to increase per capita consumption to Australian levels, it would place the domestic market behind only China in terms of overall consumption of New Zealand sheep meat,” Rabobank’s Jen Corkran says.
She adds New Zealand has pushed the message that people should eat lamb in the past, and it could do so again, as Australia does with its own population.
Paying export market prices
Supermarkets are in the front line of the protein battle, and Foodstuffs says it has to deal with simple economics on the food its stocks.
“New Zealanders love their meat and as a nation, the quality of our lamb is world famous,” a company spokesperson says.
“But with the cost-of-living crisis, price is the number one factor when customers are deciding what to buy at the supermarket. With most New Zealand lamb being sold offshore, we pay export market prices to stock it in our stores.
“For our customers, chicken is easily the most popular species of meat, followed by beef, and as lamb prices have increased, we’ve seen customers buying more chicken.”
The Woolworths Countdown chain did not produce a comment on this matter.
The trend highlighted by Rabobank and lamented by Bosley is matched by trends going against the sheep industry down on the farm. For example, there were once 70 million sheep and lambs in New Zealand, but this had fallen to 23.2 million in June this year. Conversions of farmland to more profitable dairy get some of the blame. So do conversions of farmland to forestry because of the Emissions Trading Scheme.
But Rabobank says the trade can still be saved by smart marketing that sends the right cuts to the highest paying markets and leverages New Zealand’s “nature-positive attributes” to revive the industry.
In addition, there should be more research and development (R&D) to increase efficiency in animal production.
The industry body, Beef + Lamb New Zealand (B+LNZ), puts the problem mainly on a robust export market setting conditions for the rest of the industry.
It says New Zealand is one of the world’s largest exporters of lamb, and international markets such as Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Asia tend to have more influence than the domestic market on farmer returns.
“As an exporting nation, the price of beef and lamb in New Zealand reflects what these global markets are prepared to pay,” B+LNZ’s chief executive Kit Arkwright says.
“More recently, we’ve seen less demand and weaker pricing for lamb from some of our key export markets, most notably China….this has resulted in some more competitive lamb available at New Zealand retailers, and we encourage Kiwis to shop around.”
Arkwright adds B+LNZ is constantly pushing its product, most recently in a promotional partnership at the Paris Olympics.
Mel Croad, a senior beef and sheep analyst at AgriHQ, says the price of lamb in supermarkets dropped to between $9 and $11 a kilo late last year and earlier this year.
“There were articles saying more people in New Zealand were eating lamb and remembering what it tastes like, so that shows there is a price point at which New Zealanders will return to lamb.”
New World and Countdown are currently offering a leg of lamb at $16 to $18 a kilo.
Croad adds, besides price, there is the attitude of the public. There is also the fact that meat processing plants are overwhelmingly focused on the export market. And she says even across the Tasman, higher levels of lamb consumption are not set in stone.
“Yes, Australia consumes more lamb per capita than New Zealand but that’s also declining. They are focusing on export markets because that’s where the returns and the opportunities are.
“If the domestic market was so strong, we would have been supplying it for the last 100 years.”
11 Comments
I think they are forgetting that lamb has always been mostly exported. Older sheep like hoggets and ewes were commonly eaten in NZ households. The problem is that sheep are expensive to produce so price has to be at a level high enough to encourage continued production.
The other thing is people have forgotten how to cook sheep meat. Slow cooked over a long period and it falls off the bone, can't beat it.
Spot on. Lamb roast last night was just glorious. Went to lift it out of the dish and it did indeed literally fall off the bone. Downside of course is you lose "carver's rights" to gnaw any remaining meat off the bone. I've had to resort to taste testing to make up for it.
Spot on Hans, love it slow cooked it’s fantastic.
The other issue isn’t just the lamb price but the other part of the product mix, older mutton now worthless almost, wool just adding cost on the back of the lamb. When these parts had value it worked together. The poor lamb has to carry everything.
The poor farmer can’t keep making nothing so it’s something else on the land.
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