Govt waits to claim 'big win' for apple growers

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The Government is declining to confirm that the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) interim panel report on Australia's non-tariff trade barriers to New Zealand pipfruit is a big win for local growers.

The trans-Tasman political newsletter has said it had received a draft of the report, which represented a spectacular win for New Zealand growers and that the WTO panel "comprehensively rejected" the Australian defence.

Pipfruit NZ chairman Ian Palmer told NZPA the Government had received the WTO decision, but had not briefed the grower organisation - though "that might change now that this has been leaked".

A Government spokeswoman confirmed this afternoon it had received a draft report.

"We are satisfied that the panel understood the arguments we put before it and we look forward to receiving the final report," she said.

"The confidential report, issued on March 31, has not yet been finalised, so we will now take this opportunity to analyse it and then provide our comments on the panel's conclusions."

The final report, due around the middle of the year would be released publicly, she said.

The pipfruit trade row between the two countries has been festering nearly 90 years.

NZ apples and pears were first banned from Australia after fireblight was found in Northland, in 1919, probably from infected Californian nursery stock.

Australia first banned the import of fruit trees from New Zealand in the early 1920s when the disease spread in this country, and later the import ban was extended to all apple and pears.

Though New Zealand scientists have found fireblight in Australian ornamental plants and shown that the bacterial disease is unlikely to be transmitted on mature, clean fruit, efforts to gain access to the potentially-lucrative Australian market in 1986, 1989, and 1995 were rejected.

Further talks over the restrictions also failed when access was allowed in 2006 with conditions - such as orchard inspections - so strict that exports would not be economically viable.

New Zealand took a complaint to the WTO in 2007, on the basis that the proposed constraints were an unacceptable trade barrier.

New Zealand has better natural conditions for growing apples and local growers expected to command the top end of the trans-Tasman market, but the drawn-out battle for access to Australia may have cost local orchardists the best of the premiums they expected to gain.

Australian growers have said imports of New Zealand apples could cost the major pipfruit areas in New South Wales A$30 million ($39m) a year in lost sales, but since those estimates were made, the world's biggest apple-growing nation, China, has sought to also enter the market.

Biosecurity Australia said Chinese apples could be imported as long as risks from 18 pests of concern were a "very low level".

The pests included mites, oriental fruit fly, mealybugs, Japanese apple rust, apple brown rot, European canker, apple scab, apple and sooty blotch and flyspeck complex - but biosecurity officials said they were satisfied China does not have fireblight.

New Zealand orchardists originally thought their path across the Tasman had been secured when in November 2003 the WTO ruled in favour of the United States - using evidence provided from NZ research - that the risk of apples in commercial trade spreading fireblight was negligible.

With US success in gaining access to Japan, one previous Agriculture Minister, Jim Sutton, expected Australia to open its market to without a major fight.

But Australia has fought to the bitter end, and the latest report arrives on the eve of an Australian federal election, with implications for candidates in key marginal electorates.

- NZPA

- NZPA