Turners & Growers (T&G) managing director Jeff Wesley has today claimed that New Zealand kiwifruit group Zespri has been too slow to respond to what he has described as the 'plight' of the country's green kiwifruit industry.
Mr Wesley said that options for growers of Zespri Green kiwifruit were limited because of the company's control on varieties that can be exported under the single-desk system, which he said locked growers into producing the green Hayward variety that has 'faced oversupply and declining prices in international markets for several years'.
Citing Zespri's report Green Outlook 2008/11, which apparently stated that 34 per cent of Green growers were anticipating an 'unsustainable' net orchard return of below zero for 2008/09, Mr Wesley forecast that Zespri's legacy – 'the last monopoly of its kind in the world' – would be a costly one.
'Monopolies, typically by their nature, become unresponsive and are too slow to react to consumer demand and market changes,' said Mr Wesley in a statement. 'That's what happened to our green industry, which should have been moving to new varieties several years ago.'
Despite T&G's ongoing calls for the government to deregulate the country's NZ$1.5bn (€771m) kiwifruit export industry, the results of an independent survey conducted in February to gauge the views of New Zealand's kiwifruit growers towards existing industry structures revealed strong support for the single-desk status of export marketer Zespri, and for the overall performance of both Zespri and industry body New Zealand Kiwifruit Growers Inc (NZKGI).
Results showed that 90 per cent of the 500 growers polled in the survey, conducted by market research firm Colmar Brunton, agreed that Zespri's special marketing status as a single point of entry (SPE) was critical to the future success of New Zealand's kiwifruit business.
However, Mr Wesley said that 'grower sentiment' would not change what he saw as a continuing decline of orchard gate returns for Zespri Green kiwifruit growers. He said this would drive many out of the industry unless they could convert to 'lucrative new varieties'.
He added that T&G holds the global and intellectual property rights to new kiwifruit cultivars that will convert unprofitable Hayward orchards to profitable new varieties, and that kiwifruit growers were in a 'unique position' in the horticultural industry to be able to quickly convert to higher-value crops.
Mr Wesley noted that T&G wants the right to grow and export its own varieties, and that once the 'Zespri monopoly' has been removed, every grower that wants to supply Zespri can remain, while those who want to choose new cultivars can do so.
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