Deals Open Important Markets - How Important?

A column by Jon Morgan in the Dominion Post October 21, 2009 reports that the farmer-owned meat cooperative Silver Fern Farms has negotiated a deal with French grocery cooperative Intermarche. Silver Fern Farms will supply chilled lamb under their own brand to Intermarche which has 1500 stores in France.


Intermarche also has 500 stores in Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Romania. This is where the opening of important markets comes in. I wondered what the size of New Zealand’s current export trade to those five countries is currently, and so set myself a reference question to find out.  Here are my results:

In the June year 2007-2008 New Zealand exported to:

Belgium    Goods worth NZ$587,414,000 of which sheep meat (HS code 0204) was 28.04%

Spain       Goods worth NZ$299,865,000 of which sheep meat was 9.2%

Portugal   Goods worth NZ$ 42,201,618 of which sheep meat was 44.9%

Poland     Goods worth NZ$ 20,245,916 of which sheep meat was 1.02%

Romania  Goods worth NZ$ 4,756,880 . No sheep meat has been exported to Romania in the period 2000-2009.

So certainly it seems that with the exception of Portugal where exports of sheep meat made up over 40% of New Zealand’s trade, then the Silver Fern Farms initiative could indeed open up markets for our products in the other countries and especially Romania.

Photo: from Flickr Creative Commons-licensed content for noncommercial use requiring attribution http://www.flickr.com/photos/mollivan_jon/67858560/

Sources:


Statistics New Zealand (2008) Global New Zealand international trade, investment and travel profile. pp.41 and 47

Figures for Portugal, Poland and Romania from Statistics New Zealand. Infoshare. Retrieved 21 October 2009.

Picking up information

It's amazing where one picks up information related to aspects of international trade. I regularly read a magazine from the Columban Fathers which often has items which I have not seen in other media. Last year they ran a series on the Millennium Development Goals which didn't seem to get much publicity in the mainstream press. The June issue of The Far East included a reprinted article by Ruth Dearnley entitled "A glass and a half" in which it was announced that Cadbury's Dairy milk chocolate would become Fairtrade certified later this year.

Under the Fairtrade scheme, Cadbury will pay a guaranteed minimum price for cocoa even if the open-market proce falls below it.

Photo: www.unicef.org.uk depicts cocoa beans drying in Ghana. Cadbury's will triple the amount of Fairtrade cocoa imported from Ghana to about 15,000 tonnes a year.