20 May 1997 Creation of first international trade policy chair a boost for New Zealand export efforts

Lincoln University and New Zealand's Agricultural and Marketing Research and Development Trust (AGMARDT) are pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Ralph Lattimore of Christchurch to the AGMARDT Chair in International Trade Policy at Lincoln University.

New Zealand's ability to contest restrictive world trade barriers takes a leap forward with an appointment to the country's first university chair in international trade policy.

Centred on Lincoln University and funded by New Zealand's Agricultural and Marketing Research and Development Trust (AGMARDT), the professorship has been awarded to Ralph Lattimore of Lincoln University's Department of Economics and Marketing.

Professor Lattimore is a specialist in agricultural trade and applied analysis and has a wide background of consultancy experience with international agencies such as the World Bank and OECD. He has carried out project analysis and advisory assignments in North and South America, Europe, Asia and the Pacific.

An agricultural science graduate of both Lincoln and Massey universities, with a doctorate from Purdue University, USA, Professor Lattimore worked for MAF in the early 1970s as Head of the Commodity Markets Analysis Unit before moving to North America and posts which included Trade Analysis Chief with Agriculture Canada's International Trade Policy Division.

Professor Lattimore joined the academic staff at Lincoln in 1983 and was an inaugural winner of the University's Special Achievement Awards for Excellence in Research in 1990. The following year he was appointed to a Personal Chair in Agricultural Economics.

As the AGMARDT Professor of International Trade Policy at Lincoln he will draw together research coming out of many different departments at the University with the common denominator being access to world markets for New Zealand's resource based export products.

"New Zealand devotes significant energy and enterprise to export market access and the management of the risks associated with trade barriers of all types," says Professor Lattimore.

"Exporters use their resources to deal with barriers in two ways – they either devote extra marketing effort to overcome the barriers where they exist or, if the potential gains are large enough, they try to have the barriers modified.

"Countries can now erect trade barriers based on a whole range of non-tariff considerations from food safety and animal welfare to environmental sustainability and industry survival, and such protectionism is often extremely complex to deal with in terms of interest groups and the values they reflect.

"From a policy point of view there's the task of identifying and clarifying the real objectives on both sides of the barrier and then devising the most appropriate instruments for dealing with them ... and all of this for the extremely wide range of markets, producers and products with which New Zealand is concerned."

Professor Lattimore sees three immediate areas of research which the AGMARDT Chair in International Trade Policy can address –

• Checking for discriminatory treatment (particularly where areas of health, safety, environment and welfare are used as ‘barriers’.)

• Checking for legitimacy. For example regulations may not be consistent in some important sense with other values and regulations in the market country.

• Assessing the efficacy of alternative control instruments, for example looking at public administration systems in market countries to identify ‘resistance procedures’ (entry stalling tactics) which might be used in a discriminatory way.

Professor Lattimore sees the creation of the AGMARDT Chair at Lincoln as a logical progression in the University's long involvement with the issue of trade barriers and world market access for New Zealand exports.

"In their time, past Lincoln staff members such as economists Bruce Ross, Tony Rayner and John Pryde all made important contributions to OECD, Cairns Group and GATT related matters and the general international debate on trade barriers. Now the AGMARDT funded Chair will allow us to continue this work in a very specific and focused way," he says.

"The position is definitely a 'hands on' one. We will be addressing 'real life' situations and taking a leading role in developing national and international understanding of the role of non-tariff barriers. So, it's in the best tradition of Lincoln's 'applied' approach to teaching and research."

Establishing links between the University, industry, Government and other organisations involved in international trade is another aspect of the new post and Professor Lattimore says this could involve, for example, developing position papers for international forums and presenting trade issue assessments to national and international meetings.

Ultimately the AGMARDT Professor will oversee the establishment of a Centre for International Trade Policy Research at Lincoln University which will co­ordinate the teaching and research interests of departments as they touch on trade matters.

"For example, the Department of Entomology and Animal Ecology has strong interests in phytosanitary, pesticide residue and environmental issues related to trade, and the departments of Soil Science, Plant Science and Farm and Horticultural Management, along with the Animal and Veterinary Sciences Group and Lincoln Ventures Ltd, have interests in product quality and handling systems, so there are already many synergies within the University connected with trade," says Professor Lattimore.

AGMARDT regards its sponsorship of the Chair as an investment in support of New Zealand's primary production sector and the marketing of its products.

Ian Collins, Journalist, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand