Meat companies do “a pretty good job” marketing their product in Europe but are often unfairly criticised for their efforts in what is an extremely sophisticated market, an agriculture academic believes.
Lincoln University Professor of Farm Management and Agribusiness Keith Woodford said the EU – including the United Kingdom – took 65 per cent of New Zealand’s lamb by value, paying the best global prices reports The Southland Times. Companies were getting better returns than for beef, so for lamb to be so well placed in price suggested someone had done something right, Dr Woodford said. “I think they’ve got Europe pretty well sussed but always, of course, they could do a little better.” He told attendees at Meat & Wool NZ’s new Meat the Future field day last week that he expected New Zealand’s meat industry would need restructuring to survive, but did not believe that would lead to a Fonterra-like mega-company. It would probably lead to two large companies – one a co-operative, the other an investor-owner – and maybe some other smaller niche businesses, he said.
While currency exchange and recession concerns had created problems for the meat industry, Dr Woodford was optimistic about the global market for lamb and the opportunities for NZ farmers. Lamb production was static or declining in most developed and developing countries, which meant no-one was going to flood the market. That created opportunities but also challenges, he said. There were about 1 billion sheep in the world, but many were in countries such as Somalia or Nigeria, which would never have an impact on where New Zealand sold its product.
Sheep numbers have been declining in New Zealand for about 25 years – about 35 million compared with 70 million in the 1980s. Australian numbers peaked at 150 million about 20 years ago, but that had dropped to about 75 million, while Argentina’s numbers were down from 24 million to about 12 million. Uruguay had 9 million, down from 24 million, while China had shed 15 million to about 135 million. Many of those countries’ stocks would never recover because of extensive land degradation, such as on the Mongolian grass plains, he said. The lamb market in the United States was more complex but sheep numbers were down from 50 million sheep 60 years ago, to about 7 million. Most young and middle-aged Americans had probably never eaten lamb, he said.
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