Potatoes New Zealand is asking the government to ban heavily discounted frozen potato fries from arriving in the country.
Potatoes New Zealand chief executive Chris Claridge. Photo: Supplied
It says global potato prices have collapsed and there is a mountain of product sitting in European cool stores.
Potatoes New Zealand chief executive Chris Claridge believed heavily subsidised European producers were eyeing up world markets to dump surplus product.
He said the EU currently had 2.6 million tonnes of surplus frozen fries.
Claridge said the local industry, whose annual production is only 150,000 tonnes, is already having to absorb its own large losses from the lack of demand in the past two months.
He said the industry could not wait for the fries to arrive at the wharf and cause long term harm that it might not recover from.
"We want the government to immediately implement short term safeguard measures to protect our industry from dumping. We are not asking for a handout, we are just asking for a level playing field," he said.
He said the process for getting tariffs in place was time-consuming and lengthy and he worried the industry could get caught out which would result in job losses and processes closing even temporarily.
"The Europeans had a handout, subsidising their potato producers 50 Euro ($NZ89) a tonne. This is against international rules to dump subsidised product into someone else's market and disrupt it.
"We are not asking for anything unusual, just a short term safeguard to protect the industry," he said.
Claridge said this likely dumping was worrying Australian, South African and North American producers as well.
