Future Focus: Signposts to Success for New Zealand's Primary Industries
Introduction: Key Risks and Opportunities
What are the strategic risks and opportunities facing New Zealand’s primary industries over the next 10-15 years?
In 2007 the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) conducted a strategic foresight project that aimed to address this question.
Using a global scenario database,1 the project set out to identify the external drivers likely to impact on the agriculture, food and forestry sectors, and in the biosecurity setting, over the next two decades.
The 6 key drivers of change identified from the global scenario database were:
1. Global warming, climate change, and extreme weather;
2. Energy cost and supply;
3. Geopolitical power shifts, and international trade and investment;
4. Ecosystem degradation, and water quality and availability;
5. Demographic shifts;
6. Technological advances.
The MAF project team carried out interviews with key stakeholders from firms, industry bodies, and the research sector, in the process of developing global foresight around these 6 external drivers. We wanted to know: What are the emerging trends? What are the implications for the sectors – threats and opportunities?
The team also reviewed relevant reports and publications, and held discussions with other government agencies.
Stakeholders interviewed were selected to span:
• the major primary industries in New Zealand (dairy, meat and wool, kiwifruit and other horticulture, wine, forestry);
• energy supply;
• water supply and allocation;
• implications of climate change;
• international affairs, trade and investment, and marketing;
• research and innovation related to the primary industry international value chains;
• Māori interests.
Given the long-term implications of some major drivers of change, and the lengthy lead-times for strategic initiatives in response, future insight was in some instances required out for several decades.
Strategic foresight exercises such as this, which necessarily take long time horizons and deal in uncertainties, may be very speculative at times. On the other hand, it was sometimes clear that there were a number of certainties, with major strategic implications, already on the horizon.
While the drivers of change may be unambiguous, the way they will play out is unpredictable – in part because of the complexity of possible interactions between them. This publication, which distils the findings of the strategic foresight project, does not purport to be an exhaustive or exact survey. It aims to stimulate discussion and provoke debate.
MAF’s intention in undertaking the project was to provide a basis of foresight for discussion of strategic options, and to inform an appreciation of the emerging context of future strategic choices. Its objective was to promote the success of New Zealand’s primary industries – by providing a pointer to potential risks to be managed, and future opportunities to be scoped.
1 Initially developed by Dr Wayne Cartwright and colleagues, and revised and updated in work with Scion, Fonterra, the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, the Growth and Innovation Advisory Board, and district councils, among others.
Contact for Enquiries
Strategy and Performance Group
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
Pastoral House
25 The Terrace
PO Box 2526, Wellington
Tel: +64 4 894 0593
Fax: +64 4 894 0738
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