Plant quarantine cash in Budget

This week's Budget will provide money for a high-security glasshouse to stop plant diseases coming into New Zealand.

Biosecurity and Agriculture Minister Jim Sutton said the Government would fund a quarantine service, including the glasshouse and other diagnostic services.

He told the International Society of Plant Propagators meeting in Tauranga last week that nobody in New Zealand had the resources to provide the full range of highly specialist diagnostic services required for plant post-entry quarantine (PEQ).

There has been a shortage of high-security plant quarantine outside the forestry sector since Mr Sutton's ministry axed the Government's own high-risk facility at Lynfield in Auckland in 2000.

Mr Sutton said the ability to bring new genetic material into New Zealand was crucial to the development and marketing of improved varieties and breeds of plants and animals.

"Such new material also provides a basis for research, development and innovation in the biotechnology sector," he said.

But biosecurity had to maintained, and this week's Budget would fund the national plant pest reference laboratory in Auckland to offer critical diagnostic services for levels one, two and three PEQ that private businesses have been unable to provide.

"We appreciate that constructing and operating a level-three glasshouse may not be economically feasible for smaller individual industries, and so the Government will be encouraging industries to work together to provide and share level- three transitional facilities," he said.

Grapegrowers and winemakers warned the Government in 2001 that the lack of a level-three quarantine nursery - for high-risk horticultural crops - would raise the risk of illicit imports of rootstocks and budwood.

Crown science company HortResearch announced in 2002 that it was building its own level-three quarantine glasshouse at Havelock North for high-risk plant imports.

This was despite Gisborne-based Riversun Nursery, New Zealand's largest grapevine nursery, setting up its own new level-three quarantine and diagnostic service for growers, by leasing a high-risk glasshouse in the Bay of Plenty, managed by a forestry propagation company, with a full diagnostic service through its own Gisborne laboratory.

The HortResearch level-three quarantine was scheduled to handle a wide range of trees, including kiwifruit, pipfruit and stonefruit, berries, and some forest trees.

MAF's allocation in the Budget is for $356,000 in the current financial year, and $889,000 in subsequent years.


Cullen's growing list of largesse

Pre-Budget announcements include:

$4.6 billion for defence over the next 10 years.

$24.6 million for the Conservation Department over the next four years. $16 million to increase the use of information and communications technology in the preschool sector.

$30 million for special education over the next four years.

$21 million for international education over the next four years.

$230 million in tax law changes to help small and medium-sized businesses.

$3.4 million for Maori radio.

$11.5 million for district health boards to offset the Holidays Act.

$2.7 million to double the number of Fulbright Scholarships over the next four years.

A "modest package" to help people with deposits to buy homes.

$17 million for more cataract operations.

$27 million over four years to get sickness and invalid beneficiaries back into work.

$6.53 million over four years for depression awareness.

$3.23 million over four years for a drug reduction programme.

$39 million for extending or building five courthouses. $3.4 million for more early childhood trainee scholarships.

$70 million over four years for health research.

$8.4 million over two years, rising to $9.4 million, to encourage sustainable farming.

- NZPA