In an advisory to Zespri’s 2800 New Zealand growers, the Bay of Plenty-based company’s chief executive Dan Mathieson said the move has been enabled by China’s strengthening of intellectual property rights in the horticulture sector.
The step by China helps support ongoing investment and innovation and the rights of innovators which benefits exporters, as well as local businesses, partners and consumers, he said.
Amendments made to China’s Seed Law last year had enabled Zespri to take legal action against those selling unauthorised Gold3 fruit rather than just those growing it.
The court case was due to start mid-next month.
Mathieson said Zespri believed the expansion in China of new Gold3 fruit plantings had slowed. The variety, for which Zespri owns the intellectual property, was smuggled out of New Zealand.
Earlier this year in an industry newsletter, Zespri said new unauthorised plantings in China’s Sichuan Province appeared to have slowed. However the company said overall production was increasing as more of the plantings reached maturity.
Zespri was monitoring the situation, with planning under way for an industry delegation to visit China in the next few months.
Now Covid-19 travel restrictions had eased, the plan was for the group of growers, post-harvest operators and Zespri representatives to see the unauthorised planning situation from orchard to market for themselves.
No further comment was available from Zespri with the matter now before the court.
New Zealand growers are required to buy licences to grow the gold fruit. Last financial year Zespri received $430.1 million from growing licence sales.
Fruit from the New Zealand-developed breed grown in unauthorised orchards was being sold in China last year, prompting Zespri to ask its growers mid-year to support a plan to counter the spread of the problem.
But the proposal for a tightly controlled commercial growing and sales trial with Chinese growers failed to get the 75 per cent vote of support it needed, with growers backing it by 70.5 per cent.
A secondary proposal to use the Zespri brand label as part of the sales trial in order to understand consumer response also failed to meet the 75 per cent support threshold, getting 64.1 per cent backing.
Mathieson said at the time that growers’ failure to support Zespri’s trial plan wasn’t a signal orchardists wanted to retreat from China.
“They want us to be in China, they want to continue to grow value in that market,” he said at the time.
The 70 per cent vote was “actually really good support” but 30 per cent of growers still had concerns, Mathieson said.
“The main concerns they have is that they’ve invested a lot in SunGold and in the last 20 years have been working hard to develop value in the China market and they want to continue to grow and protect that value.
“And I think a major concern was protecting the Zespri brand if we were looked at growing options in China.”
Zespri is entitled by New Zealand regulations to export all this country’s kiwifruit, except to Australia.
Andrea Fox joined the Herald as a senior business journalist in 2018 and specialises in writing about the dairy industry, agribusiness, exporting and the logistics sector and supply chains.
