Billion-dollar crisis in the orchard

Spraying of kiwifruit continues in Te Puke. Photo / Steven McNicholl

It was just another Friday afternoon when Lain Jager, boss of kiwifruit exporter Zespri, took a call he never expected - and his stomach dropped.

At 4.40pm the call came from Plant & Food Research chief executive Peter Landon-Lane about a potentially positive result for a bacteria that had a devastating impact in parts of Italy.

Pseudomonas syringae pv actinidiae (Psa) was first identified on green kiwifruit vines in Japan about 25 years ago and in Italy in 1992, where in recent years outbreaks had hit the kiwifruit industry in the Lazio, region with an estimated cost of about €2 million (NZ$3.5 million)

However, the impact of Psa varies with different environments, with both Japan and Korea seeming able to control the disease.

An orchardist here had been looking at a leaf spot wondering what it was and over a course of a couple of weeks had consultants take a look, one of whom decided to send it to Plant & Food for testing.

Within minutes of Jager putting the phone down the wheels of a crisis response began to spin and during the next week one potential case on a Te Puke orchard became three confirmed outbreaks and a stack of investigations.

"I put down the phone and one of my fellow executives, Sally Gardiner ... was actually walking past me and I went out of my office and said to her, 'Sally I think we probably need to invoke the crisis response team'," Jager said.

"This is a community which I'm part of, I've lived here for the last 10 years, my boys go to the local school, I know these growers, I've seen what it's done in Italy - I hear the words Psa in the New Zealand context, absolutely it's a gulp, it's a tummy drop," he said. "I was not expecting this call in respect to New Zealand at all, whatsoever."

Zespri controls exports of kiwifruit to countries other than Australia, with 2700 growers in New Zealand, sales revenue of $1.5 billion and 100 million trays exported this season.

The industry had seen similar symptoms in the past but Psa had never been identified.

"The implication is - the hope, I guess to be honest - that if it's been here for three or four years then in New Zealand for whatever reason it doesn't advance, it doesn't turn into a canker, the oozing doesn't start, it doesn't kill vines," Jager said.

"Or alternatively has it just arrived and do we need to be very concerned that we're going to get a blow-up similar to what the poor growers in Italy have had to face."

There had been strong dialogue in the industry about cutting out infected vines. "At the same time ... there is a very cogent dialogue that says well if it has been here for three or four years and not doing any damage then perhaps it's not appropriate to go and cut it all out."

Sally Gardiner is Zespri general manager of supply chain and co-ordinates crisis responses by the company. "Within five minutes of being alerted to the issue we decided to implement our formal processes and within 20 minutes we had the management team met, decided actions, priorities and resources," she said.

Jager said that by 5pm Plant & Food had couriered material to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry for more tests.

"What you had here was an extremely rapid response," he said.

On Saturday the crisis management team met at 10am, 1pm and 5pm - by which time the advice had changed from possible to probable.

"At that stage I said to the guys 'well look what we've got is a probably occurrence of a potentially serious bacteria in New Zealand that hasn't been here before, I think we need to alert the industry'."

At 10pm on Saturday Jager got the call confirming the first case of Psa in New Zealand.

"To be honest it's [reaction], 'Bugger'," he said. "Very quickly followed with 'okay, extreme urgency is important' because of course our aspiration first and foremost is to eradicate this thing."

An Industry Advisory Council met on Sunday evening and agreed to quickly inform growers.

Zespri on Tuesday held meetings with 400 contractors, including spray, pollination and post harvest operators, and 700 growers.

Psa does not affect the plant other than the vine and presents no risk to human health.

MAF confirmed on Tuesday that the United States had banned imports of nursery stock from New Zealand, although on Thursday, Biosecurity Minister David Carter said Japan, Australia and the United States had not placed trade restrictions on the fruit.

"New Zealand's got a reputation for being absolutely up front and honest," Carter said.

"The fact that we are so open is one of the reasons why we've been able to maintain that market access."

The response plans had worked exceptionally well, he said.

"The fact that Zespri's a single desk seller has given us a unified industry to work with."

Carter was at a meeting in Sydney when he got a text on the first Friday from MAF Biosecurity director general Barry O'Neill.

O'Neill said the six orchards under quarantine all produced gold fruit, with 112 hectares all in a 10km area.

"There's no suggestion at all that the orchards that are involved ... are any way implicated in the occurrence of this disease," he said.

New Zealand had the best biosecurity system in the world, O'Neill said.

"It's extremely effective and we are not able to identify from this investigation that there has been any lapses in our biosecurity system that has enabled this bacteria to become established in the orchards that we've seen so far."

Zespri chief executive Jager said that by the end of yesterday evening nine tests for Psa would have been completed, growing to 70 by the end of Sunday.

"What will emerge out of that, if you can imagine that information coming in is a picture of the spread of this thing across the country," Jager said.

The data will inform any decision to try for eradication, containment or managing the disease.

New Zealand Kiwifruit Growers Incorporated president Peter Ombler was shocked when Zespri's Sally Gardiner called at about 4.45pm on the first Friday with news of a possible Psa case - about five minutes after Zespri got the call.

"But quickly you pick yourself up from that ... blind panic doesn't serve anyone well usually does it?" Ombler said. "So you have to just gather yourself and have some clear head space."

Ombler was talking with friends visiting for the weekend from the South Island when the call came.

"Within ten minutes I was in a conference call," he said. "I felt pretty guilty when they flew back on Monday, I'd barely seen them."

Grower meetings had been well attended, he said.

"The focus on those has been don't leave growers in an information void ... they're obviously anxious and you don't want to further drive their anxiety by just leaving them without information."

One grower at an Industry Advisory Council meeting had experienced the Psa outbreak in Italy.

"In his opinion we've come further in six days in terms of how to deal with it than Italy has in three years."

The integration of the industry's single desk structure enabled people to get on to the same page quickly, Ombler said. "We've come a huge distance in a short time and for me last Sunday seems like a lifetime ago."

Ombler was particularly impressed with how growers had coped.

"I haven't seen any hysteria anywhere, people are keeping their pecker up, they're staying optimistic and I don't think falsely so."

There was good reason for optimism because of the prompt response and the possibility that Psa may have been here for some years.

Ombler said as calls went it was "up there", although the industry had been through hard situations before, including an oversupply crash, which saw many growers sell up or go broke, hail storms and frosts.

"I guess it may well pan out to be not as serious as any of those aforementioned events. But the threat of it is what makes everybody nervous because of what it's done elsewhere."

Phones around Te Puke began ringing at once on Monday morning, as soon as Zespri announced it was dealing with Psa. They haven't stopped since.

Beekeeper Leon Guy said : "It was utter horror. Utter, utter horror."

"I was terrified thinking of the implications."

Orchardist Huia Tapsell was in shock at the news. "I thought: it could be our next-door neighbour. If they've got it, we're a goner," Tapsell said. "It's apprehension until it's definitely confirmed that we haven't got an epidemic."

Some in the industry knew sooner. Aerocool general manager Richard Nicholson heard the rumours over the weekend and had it confirmed Sunday night.

But for 95 per cent of orchardists, workers, contractors and townsfolk, the fright of a vine-killing disease came all at once, and it exploded into a flood of conversation.

Practical effects also took hold immediately around town. Packhouse workers said they instantly found themselves unemployed, as kiwifruit export orders were put on hold. Many were shifted to other workplaces, but even some orchards shut down while managers tried to grasp the threat they were dealing with.

Shirley Roderick, who runs a family orchard, took a long walk around Mt Maunganui on a brilliant sunny day, taking in the ocean views to lift the worries off her mind.

Then she ran into a fellow Te Puke grower, and they began talking. They ran into others from the tight-knit community, and soon a group had formed, sitting and swapping the latest speculation. "I came home and didn't know whether I should be depressed," Roderick said.

The feverish interchanges among the growers formed an echo chamber, where an accepted folk wisdom of what exactly was going on changed hour by hour.

Early on, it was hope that the disease could be eradicated from the lone suspected orchard.

Later, as Psa was confirmed in more orchards, there was consensus that the disease had been around for years and would turn out to be far from crippling.

Industry leaders staged a series of public meetings to answer questions to audiences numbering in the hundreds, but no-one knew just which way the situation would fall - eradication, containment or management, and what the final cost would be.

The biggest meetings were led by Zespri on Tuesday and Thursday at a Te Puke church, proudly named The Orchard. The expansive new building, with big speakers and spotlights mounted on the auditorium ceiling, and with the sound system operators manipulating five computer screens, showed just how generous kiwifruit had been to the community.

Industry executives, who faced media conferences with practised smiles, put on a calming disposition as they addressed growers.

If their intention was to relax people's minds, they were hugely successful - the audience dwindled by half for Thursday's meeting, where many nodded off, lulled to sleep by the men in suits.

One orchardist's nerves had been soothed to the point that he suggested to the meeting that basting leaves with manuka honey would be enough to avert what had earlier been called an emergency.

Many locals who spoke to the Weekend Herald said the mood in town had lightened so much that they had become the ones comforting friends and relatives from elsewhere in New Zealand.

But many questions lingered. Guy, the beekeeper, did not know whether his hives would be quarantined if he took them to pollinate the wrong orchard. Disinfecting them between jobs was not an option.

"You can't put a bit of bleach on bees," he said.

Mr Tapsell said he was lucky that his orchard was mortgage free - "but some of these people are owned by the bank".

Uncertainty could cause lasting damage, he said.

Shirley Roderick's husband, Jeff, said he was stuck in a vacuum, and everyone just had to be patient for a few more days, or even a couple weeks, until they knew enough.

Most people agreed that Zespri and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry had handled the situation superbly, with a cool head - and had their confidence to make the right decision.

But an orchardist who worked closely with Zespri during the week said that behind the scenes there had been panic - even if this was well hidden behind glossy pamphlets, extensive information packets and teams of well-dressed organisers.

The threat
* Bacteria disease Pseudomonas syringae pv actinidiae.
* Symptoms of brown, angular leaf spots sometimes surrounded by a yellowish halo.
* Can be spread by airborne spores or on equipment.
* Does not affect the plants other than the vine.
* Disease is not transferred by the fruit, which is safe to eat.