“This is a concern for all food producers globally,” she told the Agcarm conference in Auckland last week.
“Given the humanitarian importance of food, generally our view is you want to protect it and protect the flow of food globally even in tense geopolitical situations.”
The last year has seen significant disruption and dairy price volatility because of the geopolitical situation, she says. Russia has blacklisted a number of countries, preventing them from exporting their dairy products, some fresh fruit and vegetables, meat products and seafood.
“What that meant for dairy is the second-largest import market globally was closed to some major suppliers, in particular the EU,” Crewther said.
“Russia is a very large cheese importer, the EU is the world’s largest cheese exporter and suddenly that trade dynamic was turned off overnight.”
If one market opportunity goes down you switch product. The EU has the ability to do that in some of its processing of milk, so they are now looking actively at where they might place some of those milk solids globally.
“The markets they’re looking at are some of the places we send our products to, so there would be a significant loading of product at a time when, globally, production levels are good.
“That will take some time to work through. The ban was due to be in place for a year and came in August so it has some time to go. The geopolitical situation still looks tense in the market.”
