Bruce Bisset: We're vulnerable at the borders

Seems to me our biosecurity standards have slipped from excellent to second rate in just a few short years and that political expediency more than any other factor is to blame.
It used to be that getting a new product or even a natural souvenir into New Zealand required running a gauntlet of red tape and fumigants - and even then it was most likely to be rejected at the borders.
Now the importation of potentially harmful substances seems not only allowed but condoned - ostensibly in the interests of free and fair trade.
Well, there's nothing "free" about letting loose a virulent disease that wipes out half an industry and nothing "fair" about the impact on people's lives one foolish permission can generate.
Take the case of the kiwifruit Psa bacterial disease. It was introduced and spread unchecked (and apparently undetected) because one person was allowed, several years running, to bring in pollen stock from Italy - where the virus is rampant.
Ah, hello! Did no one think to check? Or was it assumed the imported pollen would magically be disease-free?
It would be easy to blame an individual's foolish decision for this but you would have thought a phalanx of biosecurity officers would be lining up to give the stock the thrice-over before it was introduced.
In the old days, yes; now? Nowhere to be seen.
Claims that it "slipped through the gaps" are inexcusable; there should not be any gaps to slip through.
One of New Zealand's most endearing qualities is that, because of its isolation and remoteness, our flora and fauna is perhaps the most benign and the most fragile on the planet.
We should be prepared to pay any price to keep it unspoilt and untainted.
If we don't, we will lose it - and never be able to regain its splendid purity.
If we haven't lost that already. Didymo, grass carp, Argentinian ants, white-tailed spiders, varroa mites - species unknown a couple of decades ago that are now, if not endemic, then close to it.
The list of land sea and air critters plants and bugs now flourishing unwanted here is far too long to even begin to tabulate.
Add in the growing number of genetically-engineered organisms that are being trialled - and escaping - seemingly without notice and it's no wonder Government appears to have given up on pretending our indigenous ecosystems are capable of being defended.
Why else cut back on biosecurity in the last Budget, slashing the number of officers on the ground while dumbly foisting "responsibility" on to industry? Why else allow agencies like MAF and ERMA to make nonsensical decisions to permit - or at least open the door to permitting - destructive organisms to take root here?
Take the latest proposal, to allow imports of fresh pork products from countries like the US and Mexico where the dreaded untreatable "blue ear" virus PRRS is widespread - a virus that causes pigs to waste away and die of secondary infections like pneumonia.
Okay, the pig is not strictly a native and, while maligned for some of its barbaric cage-farming practices, pork farming here is nevertheless an increasingly responsible and highly valuable industry.
To hear MAF tell it, the chances of local infection via imported products is small.
But they have ignored their own advisers in coming to that conclusion; and regardless, the question remains: why take any risk at all?
Because it's not politically expedient to shut the door on our friends from Brazil or China or Canada - or their germs. Just as it's supposedly in our best interests to open wide to Monsanto and the whole GMO rigmarole because that's the so-called wave of the future.
Goodness! Really? Shafted both ways, I'd call it.
One can only hope people like Bruce Wills - the new president of Federated Farmers who seems, for a welcome change, to actually have some vision - will wield their influence to try to stop this random introduction of pests and diseases before we lose any pretence at distinction from the rest of the globe.
That's the real challenge facing agriculture - and our environment generally. Because we can't hope to niche-market ourselves as "pure" anything if we allow all the world's parasites to invade us. That's the right of it.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.