Hawke's Bay apple grower John Bostock has signed an agreement with Korean partners for exclusive southern-hemisphere rights to market the Haegeum gold kiwifruit — a move he frames as the opening shot in a bid to deregulate New Zealand's kiwifruit industry.

Hawke's Bay is to become the southern-hemisphere centre for development trials of the first gold kiwifruit outside Zespri's brand portfolio. Bostock holds plant variety rights to the tetraploid variety, which derives from Chinese gold kiwifruit stock, for 23 years from June, and claims it beats other gold fruit on colour, taste, appearance, disease tolerance and cropping.

Under the Kiwifruit Export Regulations 1999, backed by the Kiwifruit Restructuring Act 1999, Zespri is the sole exporter of New Zealand kiwifruit to markets beyond Australia. Bostock can sell the fruit in New Zealand and Australia, a market of about 30 million people, but wants the premium markets of South Korea, Japan and China. He called Zespri's regime a "state compulsory collective", and pointed out that New Zealand can export its varieties to South Korea but will not allow a Korean variety to be exported from New Zealand to South Korea.

With kiwifruit returns currently good, Bostock expects little appetite for change: "Growers will only wake up when they are not making as many dollars."

Past challenges have failed. Turners and Growers took Zespri's monopoly to the High Court more than a decade ago; the court did not overturn the statutory system, and Turners abandoned its appeal as the industry was hit by the Psa outbreak. A 2016 High Court ruling held that independent exporters could operate only through collaborative marketing with Zespri.

Zespri declined to comment. Colin Bond, chief executive of NZ Kiwifruit Growers Incorporated, said the single-desk seller was set up by growers for growers and creates significant value, and that exporters outside Zespri can operate through collaborative marketing overseen by the regulator Kiwifruit NZ.

Photo: A.j.morris / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Source: Farmers Weekly NZ