Agriculture, Biosecurity, Food Safety and Rural Communities Minister Damien O’Connor announced the changes saying a driving factor behind the decision not to split the ministry was the importance of maintaining its status as the competent authority to provide consistency and certainty to international certification agencies and trading partners.
"We had the unfortunate incident when MPI was formed that the competent authority was not recognised by our overseas trading partners, meat sat on the wharves in China," O'Connor said.
"We believe that maintaining the Ministry for Primary Industries as the competent authority to deal with those certification issues will remove the risk of that occurring again."
The changes would cost $6.8 million to establish the four units and $2.3 million in annual operating costs.
That money would be taken out of the Primary Growth Partnership Fund.
The Government was still reviewing the funding of the PGPs.
There would be no job losses at the ministry and some staff would move into more specialised roles or work across the new portfolios, O'Connor said.
The ministerial portfolios had been split between O'Connor, Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash, Forestry Minister Shane Jones and Associate Agriculture Minister Meka Whaitiri.
O'Connor said the Government was looking to derive more value from agricultural products and would set up a primary sector council to help with strategic planning by the middle of 2018.
"We can't continue to increase the volumes without adverse effects on the environment.
“We've got to increase the value from each and every one of those areas," he said.
"We'll be looking for new, visionary and strategic thinkers across the industry – people who can show some new vision for agriculture, horticulture and New Zealand as a producer of food.
“We should have a stronger focus on better value products from this country, better branding, better appreciation and better integrity behind those products that we sell."
Federated Farmers president Katie Milne said moving to four portfolio-based units in the ministry was a pragmatic approach.
"We certainly didn’t want to see the upheaval and expense of a total carve-up of MPI.
"This course avoids wholesale disruption, preserves the ministry’s status as a competent authority for trading partners and certification agencies and allows staff to get on with their jobs during the refocus," she said.
Milne was also pleased the cost of the move wasn’t as much as it could have been.
"Nevertheless, this is money taken from the Primary Growth Partnership Fund so farmers will want to see value from the exercise in terms of more responsive and innovative business units, particularly in biosecurity."
National’s agriculture spokesman Nathan Guy called the move wasteful and ill-conceived.
“It’s nothing more than a pointless rebranding exercise.
“We put these three agencies together in 2011 and it’s a complete waste of money to pull them apart again.
“The worst part of it is, though, that the money is essentially being fleeced from the Primary Growth Partnership Fund – used for essential research and development – to pay for bureaucracy.
“It’s just a waste of taxpayers’ money which would have been better invested in growing our primary industries,” Guy said. – BusinessDesk and staff reporters.
