In the article titled "Think investment not charity" in the North Queensland Register newspaper (14/12/17), an analysis of the Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) 2016-17 Annual Report was published, which requires clarification.
Estimating the cost to administer research by subtracting the amount spent on research from total costs, resulted in a calculation of $99.8 million in cost of delivery and administration.
This calculation was incorrect.
MLA defines administration costs as only those costs that cannot be attributed to an individual research project (research and development business unit and program level support costs) which results in a figure of $11.6m on total costs of $193m, or 6 per cent. This is significantly lower then the 46pc quoted in the article.
While we acknowledged earlier in the article that marketing had been included in this analysis, this too was not made clear in the paragraph that contained these figures.
Fairfax Agricultural Media apologises for any confusion this may have caused.
We ask interested readers to seek additional clarification in the MLA Annual Report 2016-17 for details of actual costings.
