Fran O'Sullivan and Alexander Speirs: Overall response needed

The dairy sector earns nearly one-quarter of New Zealand's export receipts.

"Eco-terrorism" is a new threat to New Zealand's prime export industry - the dairy sector -- which earns nearly one-quarter of New Zealand's export receipts. It's a threat we could do without.

Police have played down as "blackmail" the threats contained in two separate letters sent in November to our major dairy exporter Fonterra and Federated Farmers to contaminate infant formula with poisonous 1080 unless the Government calls a halt to the use of the poison by the end of March.

The fact that letters contained milk powder contaminated with 1080 -- and a threat by the sender to go public with the information that contamination is planned if the poison is not withdrawn by his/her deadline - persuaded governmental authorities that they had no option but to reveal what the Prime Minister correctly labels an eco-terrorist has planned.

The upshot is Fonterra once again finds itself making international headlines for all the wrong reasons - though clearly this is not of its making.

While the threat has been deemed to be at the lower end of the danger scale, the Government and police appear to have pulled out all the stops. They emphasised that while they believed the threat to be a hoax, they were taking it very seriously. Four months of investigation have elapsed since the threats were issued.

While the threats were sent to just Fonterra and Federated Farmers, other major producers of base infant formula - such as Westland Co-op, Synlait, Tatua and Open Country - were brought into the loop.

The impact has been significant. Trading on the NZX was brought to a temporary halt as information began to disseminate. The dollar also slumped with the news, bottoming out at a six-week low. Both have since recovered.

Beefed up security is in place at supermarkets and processing plants, while extensive audit and testing programmes have been employed - measures which sources say have come at a cost already topping $20 million.

MPI deputy director-general Scott Gallacher says: "The ability for anybody to deliberately contaminate infant and other formula during manufacturing is extremely low."

Even so, 40,000 samples of raw milk and products have been tested, with a new marker specifically for 1080 developed in response to the threat. All have come back negative so far, but vigilance remains high.

Inevitably there have been questions about why it took the Government four months to go public. Smaller players have a justifiable beef they were not brought into the loop until mid-February. The initial plan was to release the information next week, but that was brought forward after journalists got wind of what was going on.

Accepted industry practice for such incidents is "not to give them oxygen by releasing them to the media", claims Chris Claridge, managing director of Carrickmore Nutrition. "As an exporter and an infant formula brand owner, I'm subjected extortion attempts on a weekly basis. That is absolutely standard. We call them white powder incidents. Generally, they're attempts to coax money or fame, and in most cases the threats are just that, threats."

The question is whether going public with the threat sets a precedent for future incidents and could encourage copycats. There's also unnecessary anxiety and concern caused, affecting the general public - particularly with no actual tampering detected.

Against these concerns are the reputational hit that NZ could ill afford if the information had leaked out in public ahead of the government response.

Sri Lanka and China exhibited with the false botulism scare last year the sensitivity and seriousness with which they approach threats to infant formula - implementing blanket bans on New Zealand dairy products until that situation was resolved.

Instead of quibbling over the publicity, it is important to focus on the overall response.