July 30, 1999
By Redmer Yska for ERMA New Zealand
The story is all too familiar. You're jetting back home to New Zealand with a bag of fabulous bulbs that your sister-in-law dug up just hours before you took the cab out to Heathrow.
Tripping in a crumpled state through border control in Wellington 28 hours later, you decide to do the right thing and mention the booty in your hand luggage to the friendly MAF bloke. He says ‘thanks very much' and promptly confiscates it!
Chat to any group of globe-trotting gardeners or seed and bulb importers and you'll find a surprising number have had the same experience in recent times.
The fact is that things are changing out on the border – and the brisk new broom has taken some of the gardening community by surprise. A year ago a law was passed that places strict controls on what sorts of plants people can now bring into New Zealand. Policymakers don't even talk about plants any more – they use the fancy catch-all phrase ‘new organism'.
The aim is to stop any repeats of the wild ginger disaster, where a plant once seen as an attractive addition to the garden is now choking the life out of native species. The vast majority were probably harmless, but no-one was checking for those rare undesirable species.
According to David Penman of Landcare Research at Lincoln, the relatively lax controls on plant imports over the 1940s and 1950s and the growth of gardening as a pastime led to a huge influx of new plant species.
"The story of introductions of fleshy-fruited plants and ‘escapes' into a weedy state showed that a lag of around 50 years before a plant became invasive. The implication is that we can expect a large increase in weeds from plants introduced half a century ago."
The result of all this mass immigation is a scary rate of extinction of native species and a legacy that is costing New Zealand countless millions in pest and weed control.
Everybody knows that most of the imports coming in will be benign and harmless garden plants. But past experience tells us that a few will be rampant enough in their new environment to threaten native species – and in some cases, our agricultural production.
To help screen exactly what is coming into the country, government passed a new law known as the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act. Popularly known as HSNO, it covers any new species of plant or animal coming into New Zealand for the first time.
So if you want to import a new plant species into New Zealand, you now need approval from the Environmental Risk Management Authority, known as ERMA New Zealand, and a biosecurity clearance from MAF. In the headlines recently over the separate issue of organisms of the genetically modified kind, ERMA New Zealand is an independent agency set up by Government to make decisions on what can come in – and what stays out.
So far so good. But under the HSNO law, an organism is only ‘new' if it wasn't present in the country when the law came into force on July 29 1998. And whether it was already growing here isn't always clear, especially when it comes to hybrids, cultivars and varieties where parentage isn't known.
Importers of new plant species – tree crops, fruit or vegetable varieties, herbs, flowers – are clearly affected by the new regime and need formal approvals. But the problems begin when casual importers like our Heathrow jet setter declare their bulbs to MAF quarantine officials and neither party knows whether they are a new organism requiring HSNO approval.
MAF has compiled an index of plants which are in New Zealand or which have previously been assessed for import. This master list is used by quarantine staff at the border. If a plant doesn't appear on the list, MAF will invite the importer to obtain HSNO approval or verify that it is not a new organism.
But applications under HSNO take time and money and some importers grumble that the cost and effort of obtaining an approval (or a declaration that the organism is not a new one) often exceeds the value of plants to be imported.
Meanwhile some gardening groups and societies have been quick to explore a facility to determine that species are not new organisms. ERMA is currently not charging a fee for this service, but it does expect enough information on which to make a judgement.
The Narcissus Society, for example, worked closely with ERMA to determine that 54 species of daffodils – and a myriad of crosses – were not new organisms.
"The Society prepared a list of known daffodil species in New Zealand and their characteristics. ERMA New Zealand reviewed these and was able to satisfy itself that all these species were present in the country. Thus not only these species, but also all varieties derived from crosses from these species, can be imported, " explains Karen Cronin, ERMA New Zealand's communications manager.
"We think this a valuable way to clear up the status of those species that we have doubts about. Unfortunately this process is not always so straightforward.
"The Orchid Council, for example, is keen to establish a similar determination.
But orchids are a very large and diverse group of plants that have been hybridised in many, often ill recorded ways. Some exhibit weedy or invasive characteristics. So we still working our way through this problem," she says.
Cronin says that border control agencies like MAF are working hard to maintain a commonsense approach to the problem. But she is concerned that some seed and bulb importers still don't realise the need to liaise with ERMA New Zealand staff before they bring things in.
Cronin says that ERMA is doing everything it can to avoid bureaucratic hold-ups with the application process.
"Our whole aim here is to assess the risks and to focus only on those things which have potentially significant effects. For many importers, there will be minimal risks to consider and the application process will be quite simple.
"However, for those proposals that pose a potential threat to the environment, there is now a public process to go through and this will mean providing information and talking it through. It is in the interest of all of us to effectively evaluate new species before we let them go into the New Zealand environment."