ONE of Australia's leading wool exporters and marketers has called for the AWI board to be scrapped.
Lempriere Australia's executive chairman William Lempriere told a meeting of wool growers in Hamilton last week that the Minister for Agriculture should intervene and install "a temporary skills-based board".
He said the current board had "massive conflicts of interest" and should not continue to run AWI.
Mr Lempriere said AWI refused to work with his firm, The Merino Company, in ways that would benefit the industry.
"We are a perfect organisation to commercialise a lot of what AWI tries to do ... (but) AWI sees us as a type of competitor," he said.
Mr Lempriere said AWI's work in the marketing area "failed to resonate" with the market.
He laid some of the blame of the ongoing depression of wool prices on what he described as AWI's mismanagement of the mulesing issue.
"The damage has already been done with mulesing," he said.
"They (AWI) are not giving the world confidence that the wool industry is making a credible effort to address the issue," he said.
He said the AWI board had done "an excellent job of promoting the fact that mulesing exists."
"People who are aware of it (mulesing) do not want anything to do with it," Mr Lempriere said.
"Wool has lost a lot (of market share) as a result ... in knitwear in the US."
He said it was now up to producers to make their own decision about how they tackled the mulesing issue.
"There will be a significant (price) penalty (on mulesed wool), opposed to a premium (for non-mulesed wool), over time," Mr Lempriere said.
AWI chief executive officer Stuart McCullough said TMC had a business model that it was currently selling to wool growers in public forums and he was disappointed "to learn that these forums are also being used to publicly criticise AWI".
"Over many years, AWI has supported TMC through both direct financial contributions and significant in-kind technical support which it continues to do to this day," Mr McCullough said.
"AWI has no commercial overlap or conflict with this company.
"I am saddened and bewildered as to why TMC continues to choose to criticise the democratically-elected board of directors at AWI, the very organisation that invested in the foundations of its business model."
