By PHILIPPA STEVENSON agricultural editor
New Zealand needs to let go of its agricultural history to build a new future based on Kiwi ingenuity and education, says the New Zealand High Tech Council.
The umbrella group for high-tech industry organisations has rejected suggestions by Wrightson chief executive Allan Freeth that agriculture would be the heart of the country's knowledge economy.
Council chairman Trevor Eagle said Dr Freeth's comments at the Wrightson Agmardt Farmer of the Year contest final failed to recognise "that even with technological enhancement, our commodity-based primary production economy cannot give this country the growth and employment opportunities it needs to secure a prosperous future."
"We must extend our vision beyond our experience of the past and adopt a much wider focus than just an agricultural-based economy."
He said biotechnology had a very important role to play in the knowledge economy, "but we cannot ignore one of the main economic issues - that market returns for our agricultural products are diminishing, are highly susceptible to seasonal fluctuations and very exposed to currency movements.
"We can invest in growing the best trees, sheep and apples in the world, but with the historic decrease in returns for these products we are only digging deeper into the economic hole we currently find ourselves in."
To progress, New Zealand needed to develop new, added-value products with high knowledge content, and take "a quantum leap" toward developing industries that capitalised on the competitive advantage provided by Kiwi ingenuity and the education system, Mr Eagle said.
The diminishing number employed in agriculture was testimony to its decline in importance, and the country needed to develop industry that would give the sustainable growth demonstrated by Ireland, Israel, Finland and other knowledge-based economies, he said.
Dr Freeth said New Zealand had a different economic and population base to other countries "and I can't see New Zealand becoming the call centre capital of South East Asia."
However, it could play a massive role in global food supply, he said.
"When we talk [about a] knowledge economy in agriculture, we can pull out examples like high-productivity seeds which can give 20 to 30 per cent productivity increase on farm [and] change the whole economic basis of farming for some farmers.
"When observers talk of the knowledge economy there often is no detail of what is behind it," Dr Freeth said.
Biotechnology would be the biggest global revolution, and New Zealand contained one of the leaders in the field, Genesis Research and Development Corporation, whose state-of-the-art biotechnology applications and computer analysis were focused on primary production, he said.
Rough calculations of rising on-farm productivity suggested agriculture-driven increases in GDP could up to 20 per cent, he said.
The internet, computers and e-commerce were tools, and were rapidly being taken up by the rural community at a greater rate than its urban counterpart, he said.
People saw changes in agriculture, such as in the "written-off" wool industry, and believed it was going downhill.
In fact, it was rapidly transforming, having acknowledged that old structures were no longer working, Dr Freeth said.
Agriculture old hat: high tech council
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