Row over apples coming to a boil

The Government is losing patience with what it sees as Australia's political stalling over the apple ban, reports GREG ANSLEY.

CANBERRA - There will be plenty of potential headaches when Agriculture and Trade Negotiations Minister Jim Sutton meets Australian counterpart Mark Vaile next week in the Hunter Valley wine centre of Polkobin - and not just from the valley's famous reds.

High on the agenda will be the fraught path to a new round of world farm talks, Washington's endless stalling on the World Trade Organisation's order to remove barriers to lamb imports, and even the hopes of both nations to sign free trade agreements with the United States.

But beneath these united fronts there will also be the long-simmering transtasman dispute over Australia's 80-year-old ban on imports of New Zealand apples, which this week drew another snappish rebuke from Wellington as a resolution disappeared further over the horizon.

Australian ministers, Mr Sutton said, had assured Wellington of a decision in 1990.

This week, Australian Agriculture Secretary Mike Taylor announced that a panel was being set up to assess the risk of his nation's orchards catching the devastating fireblight disease from imported New Zealand apples.

Continuing along an already tortuous path, the panel will examine, item by item, a vast list of issues raised by opponents during the assessment that led to last year's interim risk analysis and the outrage that followed it.

It will then prepare yet another scientific review paper for a series of workshops and consultations. Panel members will be avid participants at an international fireblight conference in Napier in October.

All this is a bit much for the New Zealand Government, which has made it clear it regards much of the delay as political and believes that any rejection of its third bid since 1986 to lift the apple ban would open Australia to WTO action.

New Zealand could carry out import risk analyses, consult industries and implement health standards for Australian fruit in only six months, Mr Sutton said after the announcement of the panel pushed a decision well into next year.

But what New Zealand paints as a relatively simple process of accepting scientific evidence and making a decision consistent with WTO phytosanitary rules is for Australia a nightmare of conflicting expert opinions, a potential constitutional battle between federal and state governments, bureaucratic turf wars, and a frightening coalition of opponents ranging from farmers and agribusiness to unions, environmentalists, organic growers and even beekeepers.

There is also the scary prospect, however remote, that a decision in New Zealand's favour could unleash fireblight on Australia.

Canberra's answer is to wait, and wade through every scrap of scientific argument strand by strand to make sure it complies to the smallest degree with WTO requirements.

In effect, the science of fireblight will make the decision: the Government has made it clear, supported by an otherwise critical Senate investigation, that if it cannot make a solid case against apple imports under WTO rules, they will be allowed.

But the Senate investigation has revealed just how difficult this process will be.

Nobody, for a start, liked last year's interim risk assessment, which for the first time considered opening the door to Kiwi apples - not the Australian industry, any of the state governments, the scientific community, or even the New Zealand Government.

For different reasons, they challenged the process, science and findings of the assessment.

High Commissioner Simon Murdoch relayed Wellington's view that politics, rather than science, was driving the opposition; producers were, in fact, denied research funds because their cause was seen as political. Not that they can be blamed.

Australian apple growers rate well down the world efficiency list, and a federal report released last week found that while producers had lifted their game, the nation was still slower to adopt innovative new production systems and techniques and that its performance had declined markedly against those of its major rivals in the past two decades.

It is largely a domestic industry, with export sales of about $A22 million ($26.6 million).

Across the Tasman are the world's most efficient and aggressive apple growers, exporting $420 million of fresh and juicing apples a year. The Australians deny they are frightened of competition.

Instead, they say their only fear is fireblight, endemic in New Zealand and racing throughout the world, causing havoc wherever it strikes.

The cost to growers of an Australian outbreak has been estimated at $A827 million over five years, with the loss of 2500 jobs, possible trade bans, regulatory, resistance and health problems with chemical controls and no chance of ever eradicating the disease. A small taste came when New Zealand scientists discovered fireblight in Melbourne's Botanic Gardens in 1997, prompting expensive emergency quarantine measures.

A NSW industry estimate claimed that after the discovery the price of juicing fruit plunged from $A120 a tonne to $A60, and the price of top-selling Pink Lady apples was halved.

The argument now is whether New Zealand apples will inevitably bring fireblight with them.

If there were no controls, everybody accepts it would almost certainly arrive, sooner or later.

But there is furious debate over whether the controls already in place and those that would be established under proposed protocols would allow the disease to cross the Tasman in any viable form, then spread to orchards.

Debate has flared from high science to low claims: the Senate huffed at allegations that two US experts supporting New Zealand's case were motivated by the prospects of selling patented fireblight-resistant rootstock and of opening Australia to American apples.

There are environmental fears - fireblight could potentially hammer a variety of native plants and the species that depend on them - and a turf war between quarantine officials and Environment Australia, which has a statutory responsibility for the nation's ecological well-being, and whose bid for a say was ignored.

And there is the king hit of Australian politics: states' rights.

The states have threatened their own bans on New Zealand apples if Canberra permits transtasman imports, as Tasmania has already done with salmon.

Canberra has warned in return that if they do, it could retaliate by using its constitutional muscle to remove all powers over external trading at present enjoyed by the states.

In the meantime, NZ remains the rotten apple in Australia's barrel.