The red meat industry will launch a national advertising campaign on Wednesday seeking candidates to fill four Meat and Livestock Australia board positions, due to be voted-on by levy payers at this year’s annual general meeting.

Applications are being sought by the MLA board selection committee for four directors, in line with the producer organisation’s current skills-based boardmember selection policy.

The four positions open for nomination this year call for skills in at least one of the following areas:

• Extensive experience in managing R&D programs with scientific experience,
  working with government and industry stakeholders on R&D issues. Current boardmember with R&D specialist skills, CSIRO Livestock’s Dr Greg Harper, will this year complete his first three-year board term. He is eligible to re-nominate, but there are no guarantees of incumbents being re-proposed by the selection committee. Previous industry stakeholders to fill the R&D expertise role included former Beef CRC head, Dr Bernie Bindon.
• Strong financial skills in audit, financial control and reporting, management accounting, risk and investment appraisal built through professional experience.
• Domestic and global marketing, preferably with intensive animal production and processing knowledge. The incumbent boardmember filling this role is Iain Mars, whose first three-year term will end in December. As outlined in Beef Central’s exclusive article back in January “Mars steps back in JBS senior management changes”, Mr Mars has now moved on from his role as chief executive of JBS Australia, succeeded by Andre Nogueira, former CFO of JBS’s US division. A joint statement issued at the time indicated Mr Mars would be returning to a role in the company’s South American operations. He is currently overseas, but has made no attempt to amend those statements more recently, suggesting he will not be re-standing for the MLA board in November.
• Experience in Australia’s western livestock production systems. This board seat is a replacement for WA’s veteran lamb producer and processor Peter Trefort, who has indicated he will not re-stand when he completes his current three-year MLA board term.  

While there are only three current ‘active’ board positions to be filled, the MLA board is exercising its right this year to fill a vacancy around the board table, which will take the current board member numbers from 10 to 11.

MLA levy-paying members will vote to approve or reject each of the four candidates put forward by the board selection committee at this year’s AGM in Fremantle in November.

Nominations will open this week after advertisements appear, and will close on June 8, before going before a multi-stage selection process by the board selection committee. Recruitment firm, Rimfire Resources is handling the board recruitment process.