THIS LATEST fiasco over meat shipments being held up on wharves in China raises the question of just how well the primary sector is being served by the Ministry for Primary Industry.
All we are hearing from MPI over this issue, and the previous problems, is it was a complete surprise to them. Yet some people in the sector say it is no surprise whatsoever and that MPI is simply behind the eight ball.
Isn’t it MPI’s job – together with MFAT – to develop strong links inside the bureaucracy of any country, especially China, and find out about any changes before they happen?
That is clearly not happening, and there is a view among business people who have traded for years with China that our people are not ‘cutting the mustard’. We wonder how many MPI people are fluent Mandarin speakers and how many of these are on the ground in China and if so how long have they been there?
Free trade agreements are only part of the story – the nice political fuzzies. The real action is in the technical area and on the face of it MPI appears to be lacking in this regard.
The meat hoo-ha closely tails the biosecurity scare in which MPI took six weeks to discover that the hoof of an animal in a PKE shipment was that of a local sheep. Six weeks is outrageous; six hours, even six days maybe, but six weeks is hopeless. Add to this the failures of MPI’s FMD exercise and the Psa issue and it’s starting to look bad. There are also complaints about the arrogant way that MPI handles some issues. The DCD scare is a classic example.
Have the constant restructurings bled the organisation of its institutional knowledge? New Zealand is at a crucial stage in its quest to develop new markets and protect our borders from catastrophic intrusions, but the organisation delegated to do this is missing-in-action. That’s not to say there aren’t good dedicated people in MPI, but recent results are worrying and do not instil much confidence in the wider primary sector.
The first task of the new chief executive of MPI must surely be to build confidence and vastly improve the communications in the organisation.