KEY POINTS:
Wool industry in-fighting continued yesterday with the Wool Exporters Council calling for new international promotion while Meat & Wool New Zealand says generic marketing has already failed.
The council, which represents about 84 per cent of exported wool, challenged Meat & Wool New Zealand to match it dollar for dollar on international promotions.
Council executive manager Nick Nicholson said: "We all recognise the industry's in crisis and unless we all pitch in and help wool growers achieve better returns, sheep numbers will continue to plummet."
New operator The Wool Company was officially launched this month, combining the wool operations of listed rural services business PGG Wrightson with prospective farmer co-operative Wool Grower Holdings.
The council has been critical of both the new entity and its chairwoman, former Telecom chief executive Theresa Gattung.
Nicholson said a group of 40 leaders from across the industry met on Friday and gave the council a mandate to open discussions with Woolmark and look at how New Zealand could join the international promotion of crossbred wool.
"What's needed is a united worldwide promotion of the generic benefits of wool and the re-education of an entire generation of shoppers who have never been told about it."
The wool selling pipeline was highly efficient and the meeting was firm that the structure announced by Gattung was flawed, he said.
The council said growers at the meeting urged exporters to meet Gattung and the yet-to-be announced chief executive of The Wool Company, but that exporters had been rebuffed or ignored.
"They put out a discussion document which they put in front of us and if you disagreed that was the end of it they wouldn't talk to you again," Nicholson said.
Wool Grower Holdings was formed by Wool Industry Network, which was partly funded by Meat & Wool New Zealand.
Meat & Wool chairman Mike Petersen said it was wrong to say that exporters were being ignored.
"Mike Jones [Wool Industry Network chief executive] met with the exporters again last week, we've met with individual exporters constantly throughout this whole process, we've met with the Exporters Council a number of times, they've had input into this strategy."
Hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent on generic promotion in previous years, Petersen said.
"Generic promotion, it's completely divorced from the transaction itself," he said. "It's failed to deliver value in the past and the analysis we've done has shown it won't deliver value in the future."
The wool selling pipeline was a good disposal system, Petersen said.
"But we don't believe the auction system is a platform where you can generate value through brands and marketing."
PGG Wrightson chairman Craig Norgate said growers were in dire straits because the existing industry structure had turned the bulk of the wool clip into a commoditised byproduct rather than a luxury fibre.
The Wool Company looked forward to having a discussion with the council if it wanted to constructively engage on the restructuring plan, Norgate said.
"No invitation to do so has yet been forthcoming, and the personal attacks and ongoing misinformation would suggest that they are more interested in preserving the status quo, an option that has been slowly destroying the industry."
