By Lloyd Burr with NZN
A devastating kiwifruit disease which has cost the New Zealand industry millions of dollars entered the country because of shortfalls in biosecurity checks and import requirements, an independent review has found.
The reports highlights a number of ‘major shortcomings’ in the systems and processes at the Ministry of Primary Industries.
PSA, a bacterial infection which can kill kiwifruit vines, broke out in the Bay of Plenty in 2010 after it made it into New Zealand undetected.
Processes and import requirements that were in place at the time are being blamed for the breakout, with the report finding MPI failed to response to the threat PSA posed to New Zealand after the bacteria was found in Italy.
Responding to this risk was ‘fragmented and delayed’, the report states.
In Australia compulsory testing of all imported pollen was enforce, while in New Zealand, a risk assessment wasn’t even carried out. A special bio security threat committee never discussed PSA and a specialised risk team had no idea pollen was being imported here.
The shortcomings are primarily due to the “lack of a strategic view” of the risk posed to the kiwifruit industry, the report states, and is not able to be pinned on one person.
The report states the causes for PSA entering the border:
- inadequate import requirements for risk goods -a failure by boarder security to adequately implement those import requirements
- the illegal importing of plant material
- people moving between PSA-infected areas and non-affected.
The existence of PSA is expected to cost the kiwifruit industry around $410 million over the next five years.
Despite the report placing blame on the systems in place, Primary Industries director general Wayne McNee says New Zealand has a world-class biosecurity system.
Six recommendations to the Ministry of Primary Industries have been made in the report:
- The Ministry needs to reprioritise its resources to better manage risk
- Risk identification and management needs to be ‘centralised’ rather than fall on individual staff members
- improve transparency when organic goods are being imported
- Tight controls on risky imported organic good must remain in place
- Improve relationships with industry and research organisations.
- Start a research fund for areas of biosecurity uncertainty.
Mr McNee wouldn’t apologise to the orchardists who have been affected by PSA, only saying he was working with them to improve standards and it was not known how it entered New Zealand.
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