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Wings over Canterbury pastures
Page 10–11
Netting a more flavourful future
Pig producers bracing for surge of imports by Hugh de Lacy Pig producers are bracing for a surge of raw imported pork to hit the New Zealand market after being on the wrong end of a protracted legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Industry board NZPork had appealed against the new Import Health Standard as it related to imports of raw pigmeat. NZPork wanted raw pigmeat kept out of the country because of the threat it poses to the New Zealand industry from porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), a pandemic disease first identified in 1987 that causes reproductive failure in breeding stock and respiratory tract illness in young pigs. Aside from New Zealand, only Finland, Sweden, South Africa and Australia are free of PRRS.
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Huge demand boosts forestry
CONTACT US Canterbury Farming 03 347 2314
February 2014
Already nearly half of the 93,000 tonnes pork consumed annually in New Zealand is imported, with 29% of that coming from the United States, 24% from Canada and 14% from Denmark — all countries where PRRS is endemic. Finland, Australia and Sweden supply the rest. NZPork has spent $1.8 million fighting the admittance of raw imports to the local market, but a Supreme Court judgement released in December dismissed
the board’s final appeal by majority decision.
which showed a one-in-1,226year chance.
The board had alleged that the Director-General of Agriculture had failed to comply with certain requirements of the standard in response to an earlier Independent Review Panel’s report, and had failed to consult on another report before issuing the standard.
“Our whole frustration has been about how we could get such polarised views from scientists.
Chief Justice Sian Elias agreed with the board, but the four other judges dismissed the appeal. NZ Pork chairman Ian Turner, who farms at Hampden in North Otago, told Canterbury Farming the board now had no choice but to accept the imports. He stressed that the board’s opposition had centred entirely on the bio-security threat raw pigmeat import posed to the New Zealand pork industry, and not out of fear of greater competition in the domestic marketplace. The board’s biosecurity fears arise from the huge discrepancy between the estimates of two key agricultural institutions in New Zealand as to the significance of the PRRS health threat. “Our scientists at Massey University Veterinary Science ran a model which showed that there was a one-in-tenyear chance of an incursion, as opposed to the Ministry of Primary Industry’s model
“How can you have a primary industry not knowing what the actual risk level is,” Carter said. If the ministry’s assessment was correct, “we agree that there’s no significant risk,” but “there’s been no effort or desire to quantify where the differences lie. “That leaves the producers in New Zealand in an unknown situation of whether they’ve got a risk of one-in-ten or not. We don’t feel that’s a satisfactory way to protect a primary industry against such a devastating disease,” Carter said. Until the introduction of the new standards, pigmeat from PRRS countries had to be processed through a bacontype curing system, or treated in a marinade to mitigate the risk by changing the pH level. The old standards, which had been in place since 2003, had “managed the risk to date,” Carter said. Under the new standards, raw pigmeats are allowed in but have to be in the form of consumer-ready cuts, packaged in parcels of 3kg or less.
New Zealand does not enjoy any natural advantage in pork production for domestic consumption because the smallness of the market removes efficiencies of scale, and feed and labour costs are both higher here than in exporting countries. Carter said that far from opposing imports because of the competition they provide, the New Zealand industry needs imports to maintain consistency of supply year-round. “We run a 52-week year and produce virtually the same amount of pork every week, but there’s a seasonal demand component to New Zealand consumption: in the summer you don’t eat as many roasts and there’s a higher demand
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for barbecue cuts; in the winter that reverses.” The other white meat, chicken, faces no competition from unprocessed imports. “The chicken industry’s got this wonderful opportunity when they talk about biosecurity, that any disease that may be imported could potentially affect our native birds,” Carter said. The New Zealand industry would have to wait and see what impact the new standards had on its competitive capacity, and in the meantime was in close discussions with both the director and deputydirector of the Ministry for Primary Industries over their implementation.