Director General's Overview
The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) has a long and proud history, as might be expected of an agency charged with working with primary industries in a nation reliant on excellence in its primary industries and food production to support the country’s living standards.
An Evolving Organisation
Like the industries we work with, MAF must continually evolve to meet new opportunities, tastes, risks and expectations. As a result, we now commit our resources in very different directions to those followed even as recently as 10 years ago. Today, about 60 percent of our people are committed to biosecurity – by far our largest single line of activity. Food safety regulation, through the semi-autonomous New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA), accounts for a further 25 percent of our people, while the MAF Policy function, arguably the part of the organisation most familiar to long time observers of MAF, now accounts for only about seven percent of our total personnel.
But even within the Policy Group, which for many is a more familiar part of MAF, the focus of our activity has evolved. Now, a core component of our policy work relates to the sustainable development agenda – water quality, water allocation, climate change, sustainable land use – as well as the more traditional trade policy and monitoring and forecasting of primary industry activities.
These shifting priorities, however, partly reflect the evolving needs of the industries with which we work. But, just as importantly, they also reflect the shifting expectations of our evolving stakeholder groups. There was a time when MAF, or our predecessors, was largely perceived to be the farmers’ or foresters’ friend – an active advocate within government for the interests of primary producers. Today, we describe ourselves as advocates for the national interest as it relates to our primary industries including the associated processing and service industries and rural communities. This advocacy role also crucially covers the consumers of New Zealand’s primary products here and abroad, and new stakeholder groups with strong interests in environmental integrity, human health and animal welfare.
As advocates for the national interest in our primary and related industries, we have committed a great deal of effort over the past few years to what we call “putting MAF back at the top tables”. This reflects a sense that MAF, like the industries we work with, has been through a phase of being somewhat unfashionable – yesterday’s big thing. We think this conception is both wrong and potentially damaging to New Zealand’s future well-being if allowed to persist.
The Government's Priorities
The Government has organised its priority work streams around three key themes: Economic Transformation, Families Young and Old, and National Identity. Within MAF, we have been working primarily on the Economic Transformation theme, where MAF has leadership around the environmental sustainability sub-theme. Achieving economic transformation requires globally competitive businesses which are innovative and well connected, a highly productive workforce, and efficient infrastructure – much of this relies on effective partnerships between government and the primary industries.
Increasingly, it is recognised that primary industries have been critical drivers of New Zealand’s relatively strong economic performance over the past decade or so. Primary industries have exhibited strong productivity gains and, buoyed by improving international terms of trade, have been able to sustain growth in revenue and profitability to underpin the national economy.
We believe this is not just a transitional phase. Our primary industries are driven off a base of decades of accumulated development of human capital, intellectual property and great science. These are the industries in which New Zealand has internationally recognised brands and reputation, and something approaching global scale and reach. These industries also have very strong potential for future growth as sophisticated, market-led and innovative producers of safe, fit-for-purpose, environmentally-sustainable and trusted products for the world’s consumers.
MAF’s task is to work with these industries to realise this potential. For us, this means ensuring there is a wide understanding within government circles, and within the wider community, that these industries are indeed at the heart of New Zealand’s future economic success. It also means MAF is positioned “at the top tables” to ensure when key decisions are taken, they are taken with a full understanding of the implications for both our primary industries and the wider community well-being. As an example, we expect to see our primary industries’ significance well incorporated into the Government’s wider thinking on its future Economic Transformation programme.
Focusing our Efforts
In a similar vein, MAF has worked over the past 18 months or so with the Government’s Food and Beverage Task Force. This mix of public and private sector representatives has been exploring issues relating to New Zealand’s food and beverage industries, and working to formulate a programme of action to strengthen and support growth in these industries. For many serving on this Task Force, it has been illuminating to see the breadth and complexity of our food and beverage industries displayed in a way few had fully comprehended previously. It will be important to maintain this perspective in order to progress the Task Force recommendations into concrete actions.
One theme emerging from all of this work is the importance of basic industry infrastructure provided through MAF. Our primary products face major trade barriers around the world. MAF and NZFSA, are at the front line of the battles to break down those obstacles to our exports and clear a path through the technical barriers our exporters encounter daily in foreign markets. This is some of the most directly “productive” work we can do in terms of delivering gains to the profitability of New Zealand’s primary industries and wider economy.
Likewise, an effective biosecurity system is absolutely at the heart of our capacity to sustain our primary industries, retain access to key markets, constrain production costs, as well as protecting what is special and unique about the New Zealand landscape.
Transcending these regulatory and service delivery activities is a bigger concept we must not lose sight of – trust and confidence. Products sell in international markets on the basis of many attributes – availability, appearance, advertising, price and a wide variety of quite subtle perceptions in consumers’ minds about how purchasing the particular product interacts with self-image. But for food products in particular, there is the added dimension of trust and confidence – that the product is what it says it is and does not harbour unexpected surprises in the way it tastes, or in its health attributes, production processes and impact on the environment.
These are matters New Zealand producers must understand and act on if they are to be successful in international markets. Some do this very well. Others have yet to grasp the full significance of such matters.
For MAF, this simply reinforces the importance of our reputation as a policy adviser and as a regulator. Many of the products New Zealand ships to the rest of the world carry a MAF or NZFSA stamp which attests the product is what it says it is and meets the expected standards. Our reputation is on the line with every stamp, and that reputation is one of New Zealand’s most valuable assets. This is why others repeatedly attempt to access the benefits of our reputation by forging our certificates, or otherwise hi-jacking our name for their benefit. And this is why we are extremely vigilant to ensure such attempts do not succeed.
The Year's Activities
The year reviewed in this annual report has been a characteristically busy one for MAF. Our operational groups have made huge strides in growing their capacity to act effectively, and have been met with huge growth in demands on them, especially in biosecurity. NZFSA has major initiatives underway in its domestic and imported food reviews, and both will produce greatly enhanced food safety outcomes once implemented. The MAF Policy team has been heavily committed in World Trade Organisation (WTO) and bilateral trade negotiations, while making significant strides in its work on water quality, water allocation and climate change. It has also sustained a very large agenda of work in industry engagement around growth and innovation strategies. Crown Forestry also performed a small miracle, sustaining its net revenue from forestry operations through a very difficult period in the market for New Zealand forest producers.
Organisationally, MAF has also made major strides. Our new head office in Pastoral House, Wellington, was not just a huge logistical challenge to overcome in the midst of a very busy work agenda, it also represented a step towards a different look and feel for the organisation and the way it operates internally. We are investing in our own professionalism and in structured systems and processes designed to enable us to do our jobs better and more efficiently. Importantly, we are also aiming to spend more time looking at our organisation through the eyes of our stakeholders, with the aim of making MAF easier to deal with, more efficient in responding to stakeholder needs, and better able to align our priorities with those of our stakeholders.
A particular highlight of the year was our repurchase of a part of the Wallaceville campus – a site on which MAF has been present since 1905. Wallaceville is where our major biosecurity diagnostic laboratory capacity is located, together with our biosecurity incursion response centre. We will be joined on the site by Environmental Science and Research (ESR), who will be sharing facilities with us as we jointly build the National Centre for Biosecurity and Infectious Diseases. The new centre will bring animal health and human health research and diagnostic capability together for the first time. It will also bring our specialist human and animal health researchers together to build capability, share insights and generally strengthen the environment for excellence in our scientific work. AgResearch and AgriQuality will also be a part of the new centre, and we welcome the commitment of these agencies to working with us on this exciting new initiative.
Finally, I must acknowledge the work of the MAF team. Their commitment to their work is enormous, and I take real pleasure, and regard it as a privilege, to be able to work with them on some of the most exciting and demanding public policy work available.
Murray Sherwin
Contact for Enquiries
Strategy and Performance Group
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
Pastoral House
25 The Terrace
PO Box 2526, Wellington
Tel: +64 4 894 0100
Fax: +64 4 894 0738
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