As sheep farmers experience what has been described as one of the worst seasons in fifty years a lot of talk of restructuring the industry has surfaced. As we hear discussion about company mergers, processing rationalisation, joint procurement, joint marketing, and farm gate to the plate traceability I can not help but feel a little déjà vu.

In the 1990’s I became involved in a group calling themselves MAWL or the Meat & Levy payers Association. We formed this organisation because of concern over the direction of both the meat and wool industry. There were all sorts of schemes and ideas to improve returns expressed but the eventual result was just a merging of the Meat and Wool Boards funded under the Commodity Levies Act. Apart from this little changed. Wool still went to auction, meat companies continued to waste capital and depress profitability by fighting one another for procurement and customers, marketing and product development remained little understood, and the combined Board continued their dubious public good role. 

At the time we argued for a single desk combined operation, similar to what the Dairy Industry enjoyed. Such a structure could properly market and develop products that would deliver improved profitability to all players in the industry. Unfortunately, vested interests and powerful conservative corporate farmers not interested in serious reform won the day.  In the intervening period hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted, the crossbred wool industry is a shadow of its former self, and despite a world shortage of protein sheep meat prices are very poor.

For successful industry reform to occur we need to do more than merge a few meat companies. We have a production driven mentality where marketing is considered to be processing and shipping at the lowest possible cost. Marketing has been in the past and remains the same today - simply hopeless. We need to get away from auctioning wool allowing bidders to bid the price down. We need to develop new markets and new products for both wool and meat and such initiatives are not going to occur if left to production driven processing companies however big they are.

Such widespread reform is not going to be easy but unless the industry really decides to reform properly this time the downward spiral will continue as our competitors overseas continue to do it better. I hope this time commonsense will prevail and we will move away from the current production driven mentality to a marketing oriented focus. If this does not happen a much weaker industry than we have today will be debating the same issues in another ten years.