US president Thomas Jefferson once famously said – “If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.” This thinking will be crucial to achieving MPI’s new goal – to double the value of primary industry exports by 2025.
Our primary industries are already the engine room of New Zealand’s economy, so some might say that striving for such growth is too ambitious. I agree it’s an ambitious goal – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. The key to achieving the Export Double goal is not simply to send more bags of milk powder or lamb carcasses to our international markets. We need to add value to existing products and find ways to develop more innovative products that our MPI is already committed to encouraging and co-investing in industry innovation, for example through the secondment of an MPI staff member to the Auckland FoodBowl innovation centre to get them started on implementing the right systems that will allow products produced there to be exported overseas.
We are also taking an active role in the area of ‘foods for health’, which has already seen the introduction of Trans-Tasman rules that their claims.
Of course, MPI will also continue to drive and support innovation through our Primary Growth Partnership and Sustainable Farming Fund schemes.
The Export Double work builds on the important conversations that were begun last year when MPI director general Wayne McNee attended a boot camp at Stanford University with 24 leaders from our primary sector, who all signed up to the goal.
For our part at MPI, we will strive to be more innovative across the organisation by working in new and exciting ways and asking different and difficult questions, and we will reprioritise work and pull out all stops to achieve our goal.
If you’ve got ideas on how industry and MPI can work together to make the Export Double goal a reality, please get in touch – [email protected]
