NZ World Dairy Summit heralded a success by local industry

Delegates from 66 countries came to the dairy summit. Photo / Sarah Ivey

The World Dairy Summit has been heralded as a success by local industry leaders.

The summit, which ended yesterday, brought 1700 delegates from 66 countries to Auckland, including representatives from dairy companies, manufacturers, regulatory bodies, academia and government.

An initiative to allow dairy players to measure their carbon footprint consistently was launched at the summit.

Sustainability was a key element of all the sessions.

DairyNZ chief executive Tim Mackle said no silver bullet was found at the meeting: "It was more about aligning everybody and understanding what a few people were doing and the challenges and launching the new life cycle assessment for greenhouse gases.

"That's been a pretty good achievement to get that done in a year and have the different countries agree on how the methodology's going to work."

The International Dairy Federation said the Common Carbon Footprint Approach for Dairy would allow stakeholders in the global sector to produce consistent and comparable data.

"For me the key theme was not just sustainability itself but more about the overwhelming positivity about the opportunities for dairy across the world, particularly for New Zealand because of our ability to partake in trade," Mackle said.

The summit produced a better understanding of how the global industry could work together, Mackle said.

"And the overwhelming one is how do we feed the world's population and meet the ever increasing demand for protein and at the same time do that in a sustainable way, and also on top of that deal with trade issues." Individual countries would not make as much progress without the summit.

"And certainly issues that we can deal with collectively like greenhouse gases you wouldn't have that benefit of working in an aligned way, together."

Fonterra chief executive Andrew Ferrier said the summit was a tremendous success for the New Zealand industry.

"I guess what it does underscore is the strong leadership position that Fonterra and New Zealand in general has in the global dairy industry," Ferrier said.

"There was quite a bit more work done on sustainability and the feedback that I've had there is there was a lot of progress towards a global industry view of sustainability.

"So that's one of the measures of success - that the attendees felt that we'd actually moved the needle on sustainability."