Fairness and Voting for Beekeepers

(Thank you for the edits, CVE!)

Three of the four “alternative proposals” that the Minister of Biosecurity is considering as part of the Pest Management Plan Review suggest the creation of an “elected independent body corporate” to be the Management Agency for the PMP.  No detail is provided (who can vote, weighted voting, who will conduct the election, etc) apart from one submission from NZ Beekeeping Inc that:

“Financial contribution to the entity by way of levies would be linked to the size of the beehive owners operation and voting entitlement would be linked to both size of operation and levy paid.”

The closely related issues of voting strength and the amount of a payment (either by subscription or by compulsory levy) need to be looked at.  I’ll be using the words fairness and equity quite often, trying to determine how industry influence is arrived at.

Voting, elections in general, and the issue of who makes decisions for the beekeeping industry have been a major bone of contention for nearly 100 years.  The 1924 Honey Export Control Act, creating the Honey Control Board, caused the first set of arguments.  In that case, it was who was allowed to vote, whether it should only be exporters, or should all producers have a vote.

The lack of an election caused consternation in the late 1940s.  The Minister chose to ignore the industry calls for elections and appointed one representative from each of the three arguing organisations.  And then, when the next election was to be held, the call for nominations was not provided to the National Beekeepers’ Assn (it did appear in the Gazette), and the same individuals got “elected” again.

In the early 1950’s the NBA introduced what turned out to be a complicated preferential voting system.  The counting of votes can be quite complex with preferential voting systems, and the delay led to problems at the annual conference.  And into the 1970’s there were letters to the editor deploring the fact that they “had to vote for X number of Executive nominees”, even if they didn’t like that many.  The voting systems were not always well communicated, even when they had been designed to provide a sense of fairness for the beekeeping industry.

Voting entitlements were complex for some of the elections, too.  For the Honey Marketing Authority, the number of votes a beekeeper had was based on the quantity of honey supplied to the HMA during the previous two seasons.  But if the honey was sold locally instead, then the beekeeper got votes based on the value of Seals Levy that was paid on retail packs.  Beekeepers naturally argued about the weighting of those two types of votes.  They also argued that a beekeeper supplying a packer should receive the Seals Levy-based voting entitlement, rather than the packer.  

Then there were more arguments when someone (I think it might have been Billy Bray…) found the loophole that you could get votes under both systems at the same time, with the goal being to get the maximum number of votes from both HMA supply and NZ sales.  So again, the voting entitlements had to be examined and re-calculated to try to give a desirable “weighting”.

The demise of the HMA – arguably the most significant event in honey marketing in the last fifty years – came about through the electoral process.  The Minister said at one point that he found it untenable that the majority of the beekeepers elected on to the HMA no longer supplied their honey to the HMA.  The HMA was effectively taken apart from the inside out, with the power of the voting box.

Probably in the 1930’s, and certainly by the 1940’s, the concept of what was a “commercial operation” became important.  The idea was to agree upon how many hives it would take to keep a typical full-time beekeeper viable, – and that number would determine the maximum number of votes, and the subscription amount for a business.  Voting numbers and membership fees were generally aligned, and capped, at this “commercial operation” number of hives.  

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, that number was about 450 hives.  That would be what they would be called a (sorry!) “one man and a boy” sort of beekeeping operation of the time.

As an example, for 1956 the NBA capped both subscription fee and voting entitlement at the point when someone had 450 colonies.  That is, if you had more hives than that “viable commercial” number, you didn’t get any more votes in order to ensure that things weren’t skewed unfairly to the super-large (in those days) holdings.  But fairness also meant that you didn’t have to pay any further subscription for hives over and above that viable commercial number, either.  

This weighting attempt was only really possible when the financial payment from the beekeeper was in the form of a membership subscription, rather than a compulsory levy.  The NBA was able to use the principle of fairness to cap both the payment and the voting strength of members.

With the change to a compulsory hive levy (rather than a membership fee), the NBA was not able to continue the principle. There was capped voting (at 12 votes), but no capped levy (levy was collected for every hive).  I’m not sure if that would be fully acceptable today, and if it was, there would certainly be arguments about what is a “viable commercial” hive holding.

There’s certainly a two-edged sword in all this.  If you want to limit the influence of beekeepers with very large hive holdings by capping their votes, you will maybe have to also give up the extra levy they might then have to pay on the large operations.

And at the hobbyist end, fairness says if you’re going to collect a levy from them, you have to give them a vote.  The fears expressed are that since there are so many hobbyists, their votes would give them an unnecessarily large influence in industry affairs.  Again, the threat of a “hobbyist take-over” could be handled by taking away their votes, but once again, you’d have to maybe give up the levies that they contribute!

So beekeepers have argued over voting in industry organisations in this country for as many years as there has been voting of any sort by beekeepers.  I think the proponents of elections for an AFB PMP Management Agency are going to have to develop the idea of voting in any new elected body in more detail, given the history above.

I can be confident that the basic, democratic principle of “one vote per person” would not be an acceptable voting premise.  

Nor would “one vote for one hive” would be appropriate or acceptable, without some limitations relating to very large-scale beekeeping operations.  NZBI has described the “primarily affected” beekeepers that NZBI represents:

“…we do not have the large hobby beekeeper group that means compliance costs receive insufficient attention; nor the large corporate members for whom AFB is just a cost of doing business, and who are unlikely to focus on the sustaining the necessary skills and commitment to achieve the plan’s objectives.”

While NZBI was addressing the AFB PMP, there seems to be an expectation that industry representation should restrict the power of hobbyists, and also the power of large beekeeping businesses.

So if NZBI – and two other submissions that repeated the call for an “elected independent body corporate” – expect any sort of support, I think they will need to describe what they mean by “elected” more exactingly.

What sort of weighting of votes, and what sort of allocation of voting strength, is being proposed?  Presumably, it should be based on equity and fairness to all those with a stake in the industry.  And that should be expected to relate to any potential voting strength and to levy collection expectations… 

Having written all that, I personally feel confident that the Minister will consider the request, but will accept that there is not much advantage to him choosing to change the Management Agency in such a way.  As far as I am aware, there are no other national PMPs that involve direct election of members.  There may be voting involved (for instance, a vote to elect a Selection Committee – that then selects some members for the Management Agency) but there isn’t anything such as is being called for in relation to the AFB PMP and certainly not the necessary complexity of the voting system to be used!  I just can’t see the Minister choosing to go down this path… 

I’m personally not against voting, elections and democracy.  But I also know the beekeeping industry does not provide for a simple “democratic” solution to every problem.  The issues of fairness and equity within the industry means that to simply say that we need voting is not enough.  Who gets to vote, with what sort of weightings to create the correct balance?  And who determines what that balance really means? 

There are beekeepers who seem to have an innate confidence in voting as a way to get the right outcomes.  And for many things that is true.  But clearly, in the beekeeping industry, the influences of hobbyists, family-sized beekeepers, large operations, and corporate businesses has sometimes made creating a satisfactory voting system nearly impossible. You’d need the wisdom of Solomon to produce a different outcome this time around.