Westpac Bank is warning developing El Ni\u00f1o conditions could impact badly on pasture-based agriculture, particularly dairy, sheep and beef.<\/p>\n
Senior Westpac economist Michael Gordon said previous drought impacts suggested it could potentially slow GDP growth by as much as one percentage point in a “worst-case scenario”.<\/p>\n
“There is still no certainty around how this big climate pattern translates into localised weather patterns in New Zealand, but certainly there are heightened risks there.”<\/p>\n
He said while the impacts were mostly concentrated to the primary industries it could have flow-on effects for other industries like transport and food processing.<\/p>\n
For consumers, Gordon said there was a risk it could raise the price of some imported food products.<\/p>\n
“It’s perhaps more a question of what happens to prices of a lot of the foods that we import.<\/p>\n
“Because this is an event that is affecting many parts of the world – it can affect crops in Australia and in Indonesia – it’s difficult to trace all the effects of that but it generally means some upwards pressure on prices.<\/p>\n
“And it can be things like quite subtle events like vegetable oil prices going up. There’s a little bit of that in everything.”<\/p>\n
He said while more livestock flowing through to processors during drought will push meat prices down, the following year it would likely see prices up as herds rebuild.<\/p>\n
One advantage is that in dairy and meat, much of the production occurs before drought becomes a major issue, which naturally limits the impact.<\/p>\n
Gordon said New Zealand’s farmers were fairly resilient, have already adapted many systems and had had an early warning about this event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Westpac Bank is warning developing El Ni\u00f1o conditions could impact badly on pasture-based agriculture, particularly dairy, sheep and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599560,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-599559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}