Vincent Ashworth has been named Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to agriculture. Photo / Maryana Garcia
Working to alleviate world poverty has been the focus of Vincent Ashworth’s professional life.
“There’s an awful lot of poverty in this world that needs to be addressed,” Ashworth told the Waikato Herald.
“Governments are not necessarily interested in these poor people despite what they say.”
Part of the solution, Ashworth said, was to learn from farmers.
Today, the 92-year-old Morrinsville resident is being honoured for his work helping farmers in New Zealand and developing countries around the world.
He is one of 15 people from Waikato receiving a King’s Birthday honour, being named a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to agriculture.
His journey began in Alexandra in the 1930s, where he was born the youngest of 11 children.
“My father, whom I never knew, was killed in an accident when I was a babe.”
Ashworth’s father’s death left his mother a widow with six dependents and no income.
“That was because of the laws at that time. The savings [my father] had were to remain in the hands of the public trust until the youngest child reached the age of 21.
“So my poor mother had to struggle. We lived in very poor circumstances.”
Ashworth paid his own way through boarding school in Dunedin, working through the holidays to earn enough for each term’s tuition.
When Ashworth decided to leave school, essentially because the strain of working to cover the cost of his studies was too much, the school’s rector recommended rural field cadet training.
“This was a visionary scheme,” Ashworth said.
“It was a five-year course which involved a year working on a sheep station, a year working on a lamb and cropping farm, six months’ study at Massey University, a year on a dairy farm and then two years’ fulltime study at Lincoln University.”
Ashworth went to Wellington to be interviewed for a place on the programme and was eventually selected as a cadet.
“As a result of that training, I had huge respect for New Zealand farmers.”
Ashworth’s respect for people in agricultural professions and his concern for the poor influenced the rest of his professional life.
As a senior agriculturalist with the World Bank, for 12 years Ashworth led missions to help farmers with food production in more than 30 developing countries.
Notably, he did major work to improve farming practices for countries with harsh environments for agriculture.
“I was appalled by the poverty that I saw in places like Afghanistan and Ethiopia,” Ashworth said.
“Through my work I did everything I could to see that the money the World Bank lent to various governments was really aimed at helping these poverty-stricken people.
“A lot of my work was with institutions trying to convince these people who were supposed to be dealing directly with farmers that they had a great deal to learn from them.”
Recognising the lack of support for farmers on best practice farming, he established Ashworth and Associates in 1960, a farm management consultancy practice, the first of its kind in New Zealand.
He led international work through the consultancy to Afghanistan and Western Samoa.
Ashworth launched the New Zealand Society of Farm Management in 1969, serving as inaugural president, helping thousands of farmers benefit from research findings to improve their practices.
He was a member of Save the Children New Zealand Overseas Projects Committee from 1978 to 1988, serving as chair for three years.
“The role of that committee was to review proposals and requests for assistance that involved agriculture,” Ashworth said.
“I did field work for Save the Children in Papua New Guinea and in Vanuatu.”
One project Ashworth helped to set up aimed to train villages in northern Papua New Guinea in the basic elements of health and better treatment of women.
“It was a good project. It was really helping,” Ashworth said.
“Then we started distributing mosquito nets because a lot of the illness was malaria. I designed the second phase of that project.”
Since 2009, Ashworth has authored six published books, including three detailing his older brothers’ contributions as Royal New Zealand Air Force pilots during World War II.
Ashworth’s most recent book, The Life We Shared, relates Ashworth and his wife May’s adventures across about 70 countries.
When asked what he would want others to learn from his story, Ashworth returned to the topics of poverty and agriculture.
“There’s an awful lot of poverty in this world which I was very moved by. It greatly influenced my thinking and my work.”
Ashworth said much foreign aid was not always as effective as it should be.
“So in my particular work I tried to make sure that the money was going to be used to help those people at the grassroots. I think I was effective; I don’t know.”
Maryana Garcia is a Hamilton-based multimedia reporter covering breaking news in Waikato. She previously wrote for the Rotorua Daily Post and Bay of Plenty Times.
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