Strategic Priorities
Growth and Innovation
-New policy and other initiatives to close skill gaps in the sectors
-Emphasising the vital importance of science and technology
-Stronger relationships with other agencies
The growth and innovation objective contributes to lifting the per capita income of New Zealanders in a sustainable way. The GIF strategy focuses on enhancing innovation, skills and talent, global connectedness and infrastructure, and includes a focus on biotechnology, information and communications technology, and creative industries as key enablers of productivity across many New Zealand sectors, including agriculture, horticulture, food and forestry.
Per capita income growth also depends crucially on enhancing the overall business environment, on regulatory frameworks, investment and institutional issues, and optimal labour utilisation, and MAF has a key interest in these issues. MAF's contributions include enhancing the regulatory and institutional environment for the sectors, and working with industry on partnership initiatives such as the Wood Processing Strategy and the Forest Industry Framework Agreement.
Key objectives in 2004/05 will be enhancing skills through continued involvement in supply-side issues and new policy and other initiatives to close skill gaps in the sectors. MAF will also emphasise the vital importance of science and technology to the continuing competitiveness and future transformation of the sectors by building a closer policy and operational relationship with the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology (MoRST), Foundation for Research, Science and Technology and the Tertiary Education Commission. Stronger relationships will also be developed with MED and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise to enhance the contribution these agencies make to economic growth in the agricultural, horticultural, food and forestry industries.
Trade Liberalisation
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Collaborating with MFAT
- Contributing to Doha Round and CEPs
- Ensuring a principled approach to standard setting
- Resolution of market access and subsidies issues
- Developing a fully integrated trade and SPS strategy across MAF
MAF provides a key contribution to MFAT's leadership of New Zealand's trade negotiations and access to international markets. MAF's specific focus is market access for agricultural, horticultural, food and forestry exports. Key priorities include:
- Multilateral trade liberalisation.
- Closer economic partnerships and other bilateral trade agreements.
- Challenging spurious technical and other trade barriers to New Zealand exports.
- Ensuring that we retain control over the management of quota allocations in key markets.
New Zealand is a leader in promoting trade liberalisation and especially through its role in the Cairns Group is influential in key WTO-related forums that underpin a rules-based trading system. As a consequence it has gained substantially from the efforts it puts into trade negotiation and market access activities.
Key MAF objectives under the broad trade liberalisation umbrella include:
- Contributing to the ongoing WTO Doha Development Round agriculture and forestry negotiations.
- Contributing to CEP studies and negotiations, in particular those with Thailand and China.
- Ensuring a principled approach (through Codex, OIE and IPPC) to the setting of standards for imports and exports that are consistent with New Zealand's trade liberalisation strategies.
- Contributing to the resolution of bilateral and multilateral market access and subsidies issues.
- Working towards the implementation of a longer-term fully integrated trade and SPS strategy across MAF and with other key agencies and private sector interests.
Water Allocation Policy
- Collaborating with MfE, MED and DOC
- Data analysis
- Developing new allocation framework
This objective aims to develop an enhanced policy framework for water allocation and management that reflects economic, environmental, social and cultural values in a balanced and sustainable way.
MAF is working with MfE, MED and DOC in the development of the enhanced water allocation and management framework. MAF's contributions include the provision of biophysical and economic data and analysis and its understanding of primary industries and communities and their interests in water allocation and quality. Additionally, MAF is contributing to the development of new approaches to optimising water allocation and management among competing uses, harmonising different water uses within a multiple use framework, and making explicit any trade-offs that may need to be made.
Land Access (Land Property Rights)
- Servicing the Reference Group
- Developing policy options
Access to private land for recreational purposes such as fishing and tramping is seen as an important part of New Zealand's lifestyle and culture. However, there are concerns with the legal provisions relating to access, and the risk that access may be increasingly restricted by land owners. For example, riparian rights and lack of comprehensive “Queen's Chain” provisions can be used to restrict access to rivers and lakes for fishing. In some cases access through private land to public lands and the high country may be impeded. The legal provisions relating to access are not well understood by the public and may no longer be fully appropriate.
As part of the process of developing policy options for addressing these issues, MAF and the Land Access Reference Group it services are investigating ways in which access to private land for recreational and other purposes can be facilitated without leading to detrimental effects on land owners.
Domestic Food Regulatory Programme
- Reviewing policy
- Consulting with stakeholders
The NZFSA has begun a major programme of work to review the food regulatory environment. It is also undertaking a review of the New Zealand imported foods programme. These reviews are designed to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date regulatory policy framework that will ensure consumer expectations are met and to provide a seamless, cost-effective, efficient and coherent legislative framework for producers, processors and retailers.
The imported foods review is expected to be completed during 2004 while the food regulatory environment review is likely to run over the next five years. It is the first major review of the controls on how food is delivered to New Zealand consumers in over 25 years. Its purpose is to set in place a New Zealand food regulatory programme and policy framework across the production to consumption continuum. Key policies and objectives are:
- Foodborne illness in New Zealand is reduced and consumers of New Zealand food, both domestically and internationally, are protected.
- Trade and commerce in food and food-related products are facilitated.
- Compliance costs and interventions are minimised consistent with adequate government control.
- Industry (producers, importers and retailers of food) takes responsibility for producing safe and suitable food and meeting market access requirements.
- Extensive consultation and communication programmes form key parts of both reviews and input from all facets of the food sector will be sought.
Biosecurity Strategy
- Leadership and overall accountability for biosecurity
-Implementing the Biosecurity Strategy
The Government has made a commitment to implement the Biosecurity Strategy for New Zealand. This strategy will form the basis for the Government's improvements to the biosecurity system over the next five years. Its purpose is to improve the biosecurity system so that the risks posed by pests and diseases to the economy, environment and human health are effectively addressed.
MAF has been given overall accountability and leadership for end-to- end management of the biosecurity system, from pre-border through to pest management. The Director-General of MAF is accountable to the Minister for Biosecurity for strategic, regulatory, decision making and service delivery functions that contribute to health, environment, economic and social/cultural outcomes. This responsibility includes implementing the strategy across the entire biosecurity system, covering primary production, the aquatic environment, human health, and indigenous flora and fauna.
To achieve this end, but recognising this as a three-to-five year implementation programme, MAF intends to focus its primary efforts on the following objectives in the coming year:
- Implement change management across the biosecurity system.
- Review capability needs in light of the wider biosecurity responsibilities identified in the Biosecurity Strategy.
- Significantly improve strategic management and good business practice across the organisation as a whole.
- Refine and implement an integrated system-wide risk management framework for biosecurity – accounting for economic, environmental and social/cultural values.
- Strengthen relationships with external stakeholders, including other agencies, local government and Māori.
- Improve preparedness and contingency planning which includes the development of a generic incursion response capability.
- Work with MoRST and, with other biosecurity agencies to better understand biosecurity research needs, including the relationship with the science community.
- Expand the pest management co-ordination and leadership role.
- Manage the interface between MAF and other agencies where functions are delivered by those agencies.
Māori Strategy
-Identifying opportunities and barriers to develop land-based assets
- Supporting the protection of economic and cultural resources
-Building
Māori-specific capability
MAF has developed a Māori strategy which will guide development opportunities for MAF to make specific contributions to Māori economic development, health and wellbeing and the protection of valued resources. Our understanding of the sectors together with developing relationships with Māori will enable us to identify opportunities and/or barriers specific to Māori. MAF aims to support Māori aspirations to optimise the economically viable productive potential of their land and forestry assets by 2010, through identification of opportunities, barriers and impediments to the development of those assets. This may encompass:
- Fostering the emergence of growth and best practice Māori business developments for Māori land and forestry resources.
- Opportunities for Māori to manage those resources sustainably.
- Addressing skill issues.
The transfer of forestry assets to Māori by Crown Forestry also represents a commercial opportunity for Māori. Through this process, some Māori trusts and incorporations are becoming substantial forest owners in their own right. This contributes to both economic development for Māori and MAF achieving commercial returns to the Crown.
From a biosecurity perspective, those elements of the biosecurity programme designed to protect the primary industries also protect Māori economic interests. The biosecurity programme also needs to reflect the protection of Māori cultural values as they relate to indigenous biodiversity. Our initial focus will be on developing the relationships that will enable us to understand those values and the development of a framework for managing and prioritising biosecurity risks that incorporates the need to provide protection.
MAF Capability
- Enhanced biosecurity, corporate,
Māori and policy capability
- Addressing longer term organisational development needs
One of the benefits of adopting the managing for outcomes approach has been a focus on the capability we will require to contribute effectively to our outcomes in the future rather than on the things we do now.
The Biosecurity Strategy development process identified three broad key capability issues:
- Capability across the system end-to-end from pre-border to pest management.
- Capability to assess and address the full range of interests – primary production, aquatic, public health and wellbeing and social/cultural – that we need to protect.
These issues will be addressed in the context of our Biosecurity Strategy implementation programme.
Specific capability issues related to MAF's policy and corporate infrastructure capability will be the subject of considerable review over the forthcoming year. Without the additional means to attract and retain the right people, MAF's overall policy capability will continue to be compromised. In addition, the Ministry's attention to continually increasing operating pressures has tended to be at the expense of its focus on developing systems, measures and frameworks to manage organisational capability effectively. As a consequence, corporate support functions have been restricted to providing reactive or demand-driven services at the expense of providing a strategic contribution to the Ministry.
The MAF Māori strategy identifies the need for MAF to develop Māori-specific capability across MAF business groups to work with Māori. As key contributors, stakeholders and participants in the sectors, Māori have unique links with land and water environments and the flora and fauna these environments support. Building Māori-specific capability is likely to include training of current staff whose work areas may impact on issues for Māori, recruitment of skills and capacities needed to work with Māori, and looking at recruitment and retention issues of staff in areas where these skills and capacities are required.
With respect to MAF's longer-term organisational development programme, a project has been established which will focus on the issues of organisational vision, MAF's unique contribution and capability. That is, what should MAF look like in the future and what needs to be done to ensure that desired state is achieved? From this initial work three issues have been identified as key. These issues are:
- The nature of the employment relationship, not in a legal sense, but rather from the point of view of expectations and needs from both the employer and employee standpoints.
- The core competencies, that is, those functions, practices, areas of expertise or skill sets that are deemed by an organisation as central to its existence, and those activities that the organisation believes it does best, should focus on, and that are in its best interest for long-term success.
- Those assets, both tangible and intangible, that are key to adding to or creating value for an organisation.
The next step will be to define each of the above issues in terms of MAF's strategic direction and to identify what each of them means in respect of overall organisational development and how they will be incorporated as part of an overall capability strategy.
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 0100
Fax: +64 4 894 0738
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