Blog: NFU Dairy Board meets New Zealand trade envoy

She writes:

Fresh from speaking at the UK Onion and Carrot Conference, and before heading to London to meet the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, the New Zealand trade team popped in to Stoneleigh to catch up with the NFU Dairy Board.

Hawke’s Bay beef and sheep farmer Mike Petersen has been the New Zealand Special Agricultural Trade Envoy for the last four and a half years and represents all farming sectors across the world. Mike was ably supported by NZ’s Deputy High Commissioner to the UK, David Evans. While Mike travels the world promoting NZ agriculture, David has spent the last 10 years in China working at the New Zealand Embassy there, so between them they had a wealth of information and advice.

Trade, as we all know, is vital to NZ, and the team were confident that the EU-NZ Free Trade Agreement will be completed in early 2018. As I learnt at the World Dairy Summit a few weeks ago, 70% of NZ exports are goods (with the rest being services) and dairy makes up the biggest proportion of the goods portion.

When quizzed on the NZ trade negotiators team, we were surprised to learn that this team is made up of only 20 people in the Department of Primary Industries, but they are supported ably by teams in other government departments.

But the new government and Prime Minister was the main talking point at this meeting with uncertainty as to what this will mean for future agriculture policy. As Mike put it, there’s a lot of discussion on a 'social licence to farm' and most farm standards in NZ are driven by commercial companies rather than government. Mike himself supplies lamb to Waitrose and is inspected to Waitrose standards.

New Zealand special agricultural trade envoy Mike Petersen

Dairy production is at a limit in NZ with a lot of land being converted out of dairy – any future growth will be from becoming more productive with the current land mass, rather than expanding the dairying area.

On China, the team shared some learning with us. Food security is extremely important for the Chinese government but this covers increasing domestic production as well as recognising that they will still need to import quality products.

In a discussion between the previous NZ and current Chinese Prime Ministers the latter was happy to disclose that two things embarrassed him about his country – the standard of the Chinese football team and the state of the Chinese dairy industry. Clearly they’re putting a lot of funding into improving this for the future.

While it’s clear that NZ is here in the UK on a trade offensive, there is so much we can learn from each other’s dairy and trade experience to support the sector into the future. Indeed NZ’s dairy co-operative Fonterra already has two joint ventures in the UK – utilising the whey from First Milk in Aspatria and Dairy Crest’s Davidstow plant – so the better we understand each other’s challenges and opportunities, the better for us both.
 

New Zealand FTAs completed to date: