Loss of jobs at AgResearch inevitable: prof

The moment sheep farmers voted to drop the wool levy they paid to Meat & Wool New Zealand further job losses at AgResearch became inevitable.

Jon Hickford, president of the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Science, described AgResearch chief executive Andy West's announce-ment on Friday of further redundancies at the Crown Research Institute as very unfortunate but inevitable given the funding shortfall.

Dr West said 21 Ruakura meat and wool scientists were facing redundancy or relocation to Palmerston North more than a year after AgResearch shed 30 jobs.

In a proposal that went before staff last week, 16 Ruakura scientists will be made redundant, five moved to Palmerston North and two moved from Dunedin to Ruakura.

Turnout at last year's Meat & Wool New Zealand referendum was only 39 per cent. Farmers, who kept the sheepmeat and beef research levy for another five years, dropped the $6.4 million wool levy.

Cash is so tight that research into pleurisy, the biggest killer of sheep, is no longer being conducted in the North Island.

Professor Hickford, an associate professor in animal breeding and genetics at Lincoln University near Christchurch, said the failure of sheep farmers to keep the wool levy aggravated the funding shortfall.

"The problem is systemic, but it has its foundation in a number of things we have `bought into' over the last couple of decades," he said.

Professor Hickford blamed the overall failure of successive Governments to value the primary sector and the science that underpinned it, and the politicisation of science, which had resulted in short-term thinking over-riding long-term strategic planning and investment,

He also blamed right-wing ideology that said competition would improve the quality of science.

"Collaboration is the oil that keeps science moving forward," he said. "Competition creates waste in science."

Professor Hickford said he also disagreed with the "naive political belief" that the Government should only spend public money on a sector if that sector was prepared to spend its own money.

"We obviously don't apply this philosophy to the health or social welfare vote, but the concept that two wrongs somehow make a right is decidedly fuzzy thinking – and yet I have heard ministers of the Crown use this fuzzy logic."

AgResearch has given staff until the middle of next month to come back to the management with reaction to the proposal.

- © Fairfax NZ News