Board upheaval at PGW
The board of rural trader PGG Wrightson Limited has agreed to call a special meeting demanded by its largest shareholder.
The Federation of Maori Authorities (FoMA) has come out in strong support of the new Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.
FoMA is a Maori business advocacy group with 150 members, including most major tribal authorities, who collectively have assets of $8 billion, much of it in the primary sector.
Chair Traci Houpapa is a professional company director and business consultant and the chair of Landcorp Farming.
Houpapa says FoMA represents the majority of Maori exporters in New Zealand and the lobby has always had a relationship with successive governments over free trade agreements. She says it should be no surprise that FoMA supports the concept of TPP.
At their recent conference, FoMA members were briefed on the talks which led to the TPP agreement and Houpapa says they were comfortable with what they were told.
"What we see is that the removal of tariffs has to be good for exporters and that includes Maori exporters because we grow and sell. If we only sell to Maori we are completely limiting the opportunities for our shareholders and our owners and our beneficiaries," she told Rural News.
"If we only sell within our domestic NZ market, we are limiting our opportunity. NZ has always been part of the trade conversation globally and we led these talks in many ways and it's opportune for Maori exporters to participate in the next stage of the conversation."
Houpapa says it isn't generally known by the wider public that all the other nations in the TPP have had protectionist mechanisms designed to secure their trade and export arrangements to the detriment of NZ exporters with, of course, a knock-on effect for Maori exporters. The removal of the tariffs, as proposed by TPP, bodes well for us all, she says.
"That our negotiators fought hard to enshrine the Treaty of Waitangi and to maintain the commitment to tangata whenua and mana whenua under the treaty was certainly encouraging. That isn't widely accepted or known and again is something FoMA always had confidence in – that this and all NZ governments would uphold and honour the treaty."
Houpapa says Maori were the original traders and NZ's first exporters, trading wheat, flax and other goods to Australia.
"So it's not unusual for us to be exporters; it's not new, it's not part of the emerging Maori economy, it is simply who we are. We have always traded domestically and internationally and so the concept of trade arrangements or agreements is not foreign to us."
The climate of uncertainty and market fragmentation that currently characterises the global economy suggests that many of the European agricultural machinery manufacturers will be looking for new markets.
Dignitaries from all walks of life – the governor general, politicians past and present, Maoridom- including the Maori Queen, church leaders, the primary sector and family and friends packed Our Lady of Kapiti’s Catholic church in Paraparaumu on Thursday October 23 to pay tribute to former prime Minister, Jim Bolger who died last week.
Agriculture and Forestry Minister, Todd McClay is encouraging farmers, growers, and foresters not to take unnecessary risks, asking that they heed weather warnings today.
With nearly two million underutilised dairy calves born annually and the beef price outlook strong, New Zealand’s opportunity to build a scalable dairy-beef system is now.
Graduates of a newly-updated Agri-Women’s Development Trust (AWDT) course are taking more value than ever from the programme, with some even walking away calling themselves the “farm CFO”.
Meet the Need, a farmer-led charity, says food insecurity in New Zealand is dire, with one in four children now living in a household experiencing food insecurity, according to Ministry of Health data.
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