Politics stymied apple exports, NZ tells WTO

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New Zealand has told the World Trade Organisation of eight years of political interference that have stymied its bid to export apples to Australia.

The two countries faced off before a WTO disputes panel in Geneva this week. New Zealand asked that Australia be required to base its apple access decision on science that the WTO had already accepted in a case involving the United States and Japan. Australia said that this scientific view was not necessarily the correct one.

The panel hearing ended yesterday and a second round of written submissions will be filed in February. This will be followed by more oral submissions in March, probably before a panel of science witnesses. A final verdict can be expected in May.

New Zealand said Australia's case was based on "conjecture and supposition", not on scientific evidence. It said such evidence did not exist.

This difference between the parties was the issue the panel had to decide. New Zealand set out the four requests it had made to reopen the apple trade in the past 22 years. The most recent was made in 1999 and Australia made a commitment to complete an import risk analysis before the end of that year.

"In spite of this initial response, Australia would take almost eight more years to complete its risk analysis process, which ultimately would still not provide New Zealand with commercially meaningful access for apple fruit."

The ground rules for consideration of the New Zealand request kept changing and the process was "interwoven with a parallel political process".

In 2000, with a federal election looming, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, and his deputy, John Anderson, pledged that they would never allow New Zealand apples into Australia and unions threatened to blockade ports.

The next year, after a senate committee inquiry, Biosecurity Australia, till then an independent body, announced changes to the way it would assess the New Zealand apple import request, including the appointment of an apple grower to its risk analysis panel.

It was not till 2004 that the panel released a draft risk analysis that stipulated strict measures to prevent the risk of fireblight from New Zealand apples. This ignored a WTO decision on the import of United States apples to Japan that mature apples could not transmit fireblight.

Then, with another election close, the Australian senate began a new inquiry, which a year later expressed concern that the economic consequences of a fireblight outbreak had not been fully covered by Biosecurity Australia.

A third draft analysis was issued at the end of 2005 and was confirmed in March 2007. It laid down restrictions aimed at fireblight and other diseases, including European canker and leaf curling midge, that included orchard inspections and chlorine dips.

New Zealand attempts to modify these during talks about a standard operating procedure were stonewalled by Australia and it had no choice but to go to the WTO.

In reply, Australia said the WTO could not deny Australia its sovereign right to determine its own "appropriate level of protection" from disease. "What matters in the present case is the risk that Australia is prepared to tolerate, not the risk that New Zealand is prepared to tolerate."