Pork noise from New Zealand

Thursday, October 1, 2009

"The Canadian government's NZ$100 million support for their ailing pork industry is essentially subsidies in drag," New Zealand Pork said in August. "Cheap subsidized pork will make its way to New Zealand, undermining our local industry," charged New Zealand Pork Chief Executive Sam McIvor.

He noted that New Zealand already imports 200,000 kilograms of Canadian pork weekly – "pork that can be produced using growth hormones and other standards of production that are not up to New Zealand standards."

But relations aren't as bad as that suggests, says Martin Rice, McIvor's counterpart at the Canadian Pork Council. "We usually have quite positive dialogue with them," Rice says. He suspects that the New Zealand pork board is letting producers know that it is watching what is happening in the world.

New Zealand's weekly slaughter of pigs of all sizes in mid-August was just under 13,000 and imports from Canada are the equivalent of meat from 300 hogs weekly, Rice says.

The difference between New Zealand and Canada is that New Zealand pork consumption is growing. "In the long run, it is a sustainable industry," Rice says.  BP