THE future of wool is being jeopardised by a failure to listen to its customers.
This is the opinion of wool historian and prominent NSW Merino breeder Charles Massy.
He told a woolclasser forum in Bendigo last week he was"appalled by what is going on" regarding Australia's response to the mulesing issue.
"We are kicking sand in the face of our customers," he said.
Mr Massy traced much of problem of the Merino and its ability to cope with flystrike back to the 1880s and the introduction by Samuel McCaughey of the excessively wrinkled Vermont Merino to boost wool cuts.
Since then, Merino breeders had done little to address the problem of wrinkly sheep, despite the fact that a plainer-bodied sheep was less prone to flystrike and in less need of mulesing, he said.
Mr Massy said the wool industry had a history over two centuries of failing to take heed of its customers and had lost market share accordingly to cotton and synthetics.
He said to keep pace with these competing fibres the wool industry needed to continue working on improving its fibre qualities through either genetics, classing or chemical modification.
However, for Mr Massy, mulesing and the failure to listen to customers were not the only issues of concern.
Mr Massy, who has been a long-time critic of institutionalised marketing, described Australian Wool Innovation's latest attempts as "working with a failed model".
"Ever since the Korean War we seemed to be more intent on protecting the institutions," he said, citing the former International Wool Secretariat, the Australian Wool Board and its successors.
"It's abysmal what is going on at the moment at the AWI board," he said. "We need to get politics out of wool."
Mr Massy said he favoured the abolition of wool taxes to allow producers or groups of producers to invest in their own supply-chain marketing, similar to the wine and dairy industries.
He said the wool levies based on gross returns represented the skimming of a farmer's profit.
"We know supply-chain marketing of segmented or regional brands had the potential, but it has never been given a chance," Mr Massy said.
"In the past, supply chains were undermined by the marketing policies of the IWS."
An AWI spokesman said Mr Massy's criticisms were nothing new and that producers should await details of AWI's strategic marketing plans which were about to be implemented.
