It comes after industry leaders came home from the Global Dairy Summit in India last week, questioning why New Zealand was decreasing production to focus on emissions while other countries were increasing both production and emissions.
NZX Head of Analytics Julia Jones told Rural Exchange we shouldn’t be arguing that because everyone else gets to produce more, we should too.
“We’re not going to stop Brazil cutting down another couple of forests to put in another dairy farm,” Jones said.
“While we stress about that, and we use all this energy worrying about things we have no control over, we have nothing left in the tank when we come to do the things that we can control.”
As an export country, she said the harsh reality was that New Zealand needs the world to buy its food.
Being seen as a large agricultural emitter on the world stage, consumers need to believe we were doing everything possible to reduce emissions.
“They don’t need to buy our food, so they will find it somewhere else,” she said.
“We are a minority exporter, around the world we are loved but people will shift and find somewhere else to get the products if we don’t do what they want.”
She wanted farmers and industry leaders to be looking at what consumers were seeing and wanting, instead of fighting against a losing current and wasting energy.
“I actually believe in what we’re doing as a country and we don’t want to produce too much. I mean, this might sound a little bit crazy but the reality of it is because we have limited production, we have actually already created a premium.”
“We need to stop getting so hung up on the stuff we can’t do and start thinking about commercial opportunities.”
Source: TODAY FM
