Between the lines: Chance for woolgrowers to yarn about old issues

Woolgrowers have never been short of advice. Their trouble has been sorting the good from the dags.

A trawl through a legion of expensive, but ignored, reports and smart, but abandoned, schemes suggests just one thing - that woolgrowers are their own worst enemies.

So today, having missed many previous opportunities to halt the long-term decline of the industry that laid New Zealand's economic foundation, sheep farmers will embark on another talkfest - the Wool Board annual meeting - in a bid to regain their profitability.

There is undoubtedly money to be made from wool and plenty of people do it day in, day out, year in, year out. But few of them are farmers.

There are simply too many people trying to live off the sheep's back.

It is ridiculous - some say criminal - that in an industry handling $700 million worth of wool there are 100 exporters (10 handling 75 per cent of the wool), 139 private wool buyers (six account for more than 50 per cent of private sales), 11 woolbrokers (six handle 90 per cent of the wool), 12 scouring plants and 12 trade associations.

Robert Pratt, the former head of the most successful integrated fibre firm, Elcowool, told the industry's latest high-paid consultants that the entire New Zealand clip could be easily handled by four or five mirror images of his firm.

It would, he said, bring about the decimation of the industry in its traditional cumbersome and grossly inefficient state, transforming it into a logistically sensible and highly cost-effective marketing system.

His blueprint - one that others have also vainly urged the industry to adopt - would spell the closure of six scours, the demise of 100 private buyers, 95 exporters, the auction system, all woolbrokers and at least eight trade associations.

In the clean sweep, undoubtedly gone, too, would be the producers' own organisation, the 56-year-old Wool Board, and its various subsidiaries.

In a practical sense, killing off the board may not be the place for growers to start an industry restructuring, but in the politically plagued sector they would do well to give it a good push down the skids.

They can benefit from some of its functions, notably funding research, but if they take the best advice on offer there will be no other significant function left for the board to perform.

As a million-dollar report advised growers in 1992: "Enhancement of wool's position as a competitive fibre and maximisation of returns to the grower will depend primarily on wool's ability to understand and meet the needs of the market."

It is good advice and tomorrow we will find out whether growers, who have paid millions more to be told it again, will know it when they hear it.