Abstract

Looking from New Zealand at the food markets of the future, presents our industries with something of a challenge. To those with an industry background, this may seem an overcautious view. We are not altogether inexperienced as a food exporter, and can date trading in food products to well before colonisation. Today, over half New Zealand’s total merchandise exports are food products, and we can count most countries of the world as our markets for food products of some sort or other. So why would meeting these future markets be so challenging? First, our experience as a food exporter has largely been with commodities; only recently has New Zealand started to significantly differentiate and transform its exports into more sophisticated products. Second, the wealthy consumer markets even of today, are hugely more complex than they used to be, and consumers’ purchasing decisions are subject to many new influences, some almost totally unrelated to food, as such. Third, the control our exporters have over their food markets value chains is weak, and while this does not preclude us from participating, our returns are often constrained to f.o.b. margins, which will provide little more than a modest return on the capital we have invested in production systems. Last, some significant barriers to trade remain, in our most important markets. Some would describe these as intractable; suffice to say, progress in dismantling them has been painfully slow. All is not lost however. We are increasingly aware of the demands of future markets and, putting to one side the required action from our trading partners, we know what we need to do to lift our performance. Whether we have the will to change some historical behaviour and adequately re-configure the value chain in New Zealand remains to be seen; however, some radical surgery will be necessary. Of the many factors influencing the future shape of our food markets, technology is surely the most significant. E-commerce, and the dis-intermediation of our value chains that it is causing, is one example. The advances in food technology, biotechnology, and the ways in which we manage production systems are others. We need to understand and harness all these technologies. Market-related factors include rapidly changing lifestyles, the growing strength of food safety and animal welfare interest groups, and the need to be market-ready with consumer friendly, fresh products, all year round. New Zealand will need to do most things differently, and more quickly, to service our future markets with confidence.

R, Christie

Proceedings of the New Zealand Society of Animal Production, Volume 60, Hamilton, 78-82, 2000