Greenlife plants are very important to New Zealanders but only a small handful of new plant species have been allowed to be imported since the HSNO Act came into force in 1998. Back in 2019, NZPPI sought to change this.

We held a meeting for members in June 2019 and took their feedback to a joint planning session with senior MPI officials. This led to workshop in Wellington with participants across the main sector groups, NGOs, councils and MPI.  NZPPI’s diagram of a ‘broken plant imports pipeline’ resonated with attendees. We led one of ten projects that spun out of the workshop, to try and fix urgent issues that could be fixed done relatively quickly without a lot of resources. Two of our early wins were changes to pelleted seed imports and GM testing for Petunia.

Pelleted Seed Imports

In 2016, MPI introduced weed seed testing for pelleted seeds in response to the detection of the weed species Abutilon theophrasti in pelleted fodder beet seeds. direct (mpi.govt.nz). Mandatory testing was first introduced for arable, field and vegetable seeds. In 2017 it was introduced for greenlife flower, herb and glasshouse species. This had major impacts that (in our view) exceeded the risk being managed. The measures required testing of all pelleted seed batches. Greenlife and glasshouse species are imported in small batches of hundreds of different lines, which added to thousands of dollars in destroyed seeds and testing costs. In 2019, NZPPI held many meetings with MPI to in an effort to replace the emergency measures with more rational, lower-cost options. The data showed that ornamental and glasshouse species were low risk and unlikely to result in agricultural weeds in the New Zealand environment.  Eventually MPI decided to remove mandatory testing on this group. 

20190812 RMP Pellet Seeds (mpi.govt.nz)

 New Zealand Plant Producers Incorporated (NZPPI) - Pelleted seed imports (nzppib.co.nz)

Petunia

Importers previously had to undertake GMO testing for every Petunia seed and nursery stock import into New Zealand. This was in response to the discovery GM Petunias were inadvertently in the breeding lines. See Genetically Modified (GM) petunias (mpi.govt.nz). The testing regime was hugely expensive and the logistics of organising offshore testing meant it was difficult to order stock in response to local customer orders.  Nursery stock needed a permit application and there was a certain amount of to-and-froing on test certificates. NZPPI successfully campaigned to change this to an exporter/importer declaration that varieties were not GM. This system is very simple and already used in potato tissue culture imports.