Producer Control in the New Zealand Meat Industry in the 1940s/1950s

Abstract

The New Zealand Meat Producers’ Export Control Board, set up in the 1920s, implemented a policy of producer control of meat processing facilities to maximise producers’ income by restricting foreign investment in New Zealand. Meat Board members were not chosen directly by producers but indirectly through an electoral college system. Previous authors have suggested that that system isolated Board members from producer interests. This paper concludes that in the period after World War II the Board, led by an intransigent chairman, had indeed become detached from producers and its policy of producer control operated against producer interests.