By Les Watkins
Fierce debate about the damage wreaked by excessive gambling has been sparked by the controversy over pokies, Sky City and a proposed convention centre. Far less has been said, however, about the nation’s economy being jeopardised by the really big-time problem gamblers – the blinkered bureaucrats and politicians who seem poised to risk billions in a lunatic game of Russian Roulette.
Our front page story details the risks being taken with our $1 billion pork industry – the latest in a series of ill advised decisions. And that’s only a fraction of the almost incomprehensible stupidity.
Experts are fearfully waiting to learn if our $1 billion bee industry is also to be put at risk – and face possible destruction – because of an import relaxation being considered by the Ministry of Primary Industries, which was formerly the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.
Their anxiety has dragged on for more than three years since a plan was mooted to allow Australian honey to be imported in this country for the first time.
The National Beekeepers Association, which warns that such a move could prove disastrous, has been advised that a decision will probably be made this year.
Joint chief executive Daniel Paul has explained the NBA’s concerns: “Australia has pests and diseases that we don’t have here. These could well be imported with the honey and, also, there is no guarantee that all honey exported from Australia really is Australian.”
He was referring to the dishonest practice known as honey laundering. This involves a product of the exporting country being mixed with that from countries – China, for instance – which may be plagued by other exotic diseases.
And it’s not just the honey trade which could be at risk.
Bees pollinate roughly a third of everything we eat and more than $5 billion or our annual exports are attributable to them. They are vital for our agriculture – pollinating clover, for instance, and so boosting nitrogen in farmland – and for the production of so many foods, including apples and kiwifruit.
Yet we’ve lost about 50 percent of this vital workforce – nearly all the feral bees – since a bio-security breach let the parasitic varroa mite start to flourish here in 2000.
And those 12 years have also seen a disturbing increase of lethal problems in managed hives. Do our decision-makers really want to gamble on the possibility of allowing still more problems into New Zealand?
Last month we learned that the bacterial disease Psa-V looks like costing our kiwifruit industry up to $410 million over the next five years – and up to 470 jobs annually for three years – and that the long-term impact of lost development could be as high as $885 million.
We also learned that American and Italian scientists had evidence suggesting that this threat to our economy originated in China. That’s where the disease first occurred in the 1980s.
Psa-V’s entry into New Zealand clearly resulted from another bio-security failure.
Another slip-up in 2006 lumbered us with the tiny voracious flying insect Psyllid – known in America as the jumping plant louse and described by Plant and Food Research scientists as the worst vegetable pest they’d ever encountered.
It cost the potato industry alone more than $50 million in just one year. It also attacks tomato and tamarillo crops and in its first three years here it was estimated to have cost more than $130 million in lost production and extra insecticides.
Last month the Queensland fruit fly, considered the world’s most destructive fruit fly, was found in Auckland. These flies breed very quickly and attack vegetables and most fruit – especially citrus, berries and stone fruits – and cost Aussie growers more than $100 million a year.
It is not known at time of writing if there are more of these intruders but the discovery prompted Labour’s primary industries spokesman Damien O’Connor to attack the government for having “slashed our frontline bio-security staff and services”.
“One casualty of the cuts has been the loss of the sniffer dog at Wellington Airport since October,” he said. “The government is running our bio-security system into the ground.”
He may be right. But there’s a world of difference between unintentional biosecurity muck-ups – however often they may happen – and the deliberate courting of possible trouble. That’s precisely what the government is doing over pork – and is considering doing over honey.
As I said earlier, our politicians are the most dangerous of this country’s problem gamblers.
