While Australia’s grower-dominated produce industry model comes with its benefits, the relatively new head of an exporter representative body warns the industry may be “losing out” from a lack of branding and an undermining of traders. 

Australian Horticultural Exporters Association (AHEA) CEO Dominic Jenkin says it will be a slow process for different players in the produce industry to better cooperate with one another.

For that reason, he urges as many stakeholders as possible to reach out to him and his organization, which represents both exporters and importers of horticultural products.

“It’s been a stoush between the upstream and downstream elements where I think the major issue in resolving that is all around communication and transparency,” Jenkin tells www.freshfruitportal.com.

“Here in Australia because we’re blessed if you’re able to you can scale up on your own, I’ve found the way people grow their businesses is we’ll attempt to do it all ourselves and if it fails maybe we’ll consider the other option.

“But that’s usually the first attempt. It would be a more efficient model to bypass that first attempt and we should be looking to form really strong linkages with companies that hold all the expertise.”

He highlights in an environment where money spent on developing the industry is predominantly collected from the pockets of growers, they might not be seeing “all of the elements required to get their product from a tree to a plate somewhere in the world”.

“There’s been a kind of undermining of the trader or the service provider along that value chain - in the production base they’ve seen a few success stories of producer to vertically integrated exporter, and they think that seemingly there are no middle steps to arrive at that,” he says.

“I’ve seen a lot of activity reaching out from production level to other markets, but if we’re not linking that through to logistics, market access, appropriate sales and marketing, those opportunities are not going to be realized.

“On the other side what we’re doing is just inviting the opposite to occur whereby parties from other countries can get closer and closer to our production, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re obtaining the most value on-shore for Australia.”

This cooperation and understanding between exporters and growers is now more important than ever, as Australia reaches a new phase as a produce exporter and continues to gain new market access agreements.

“I think we’re arriving at a point where we’re maturing as an exporting nation, so after a big lull for the past 10 years nearly where there was limited growth across the sector, we’re seeing real growth now.

“That’s being built off the back of consolidated enterprises in our exported crops where the expertise in Australia to penetrate those markets is getting better.

“Our ability to advocate for market access is getting better year on year but there’s still plenty of a way to go.”

He highlights the recent Chinese market opening for Australian nectarines, as well as Japanese access for melons and pumpkins, took a significant amount of time.

“I wouldn’t put that against any governments. It’s just about the even pressure applied on these matters over a period of time to get them through.

Apart from AHEA’s core priority of getting Australian stakeholders to work more closely together, Jenkin would also like to see more cooperation with other growing nations and markets.

“In that space in particular I’m trying to look at ways we can utilize the information we’re collecting as a group to start having better market intelligence of what’s going on.

“That’s something Australia I think is underperforming in terms of what’s going on. Countries like Chile and the United States of America, they have good reporting systems in terms of what’s going on, what their trade traffic is, we don’t have that here – it’s all guesswork.”

He says this sort of information sharing would benefit everyone involved, both in Australia and abroad.

“Why not anticipate market conditions through greater access to intelligence which will allow us to better and more responsively align supply to demand? This will enable us to avoid the oversupply in critical periods such as Chinese New Year."

www.freshfruitportal.com