Zespri has announced a potential Psa recovery pathway for New Zealand’s kiwifruit industry with a significant boost in new licences for the G3 gold variety.
The New Zealand kiwifruit marketer said today the Gold3, or G3, variety had shown a “good level” of tolerance to the Psa bacterial disease compared to the current Zespri Gold cultivar, Hort16A, and 45 other kiwifruit varieties tested.
If that solid tolerance level continues through to May this year, Zespri has said it will release G3 on a broad scale, enough to cover the grafting demand from Hort16A growers, with additional licences for other growers of up to 400ha.
In addition, Zespri will release a further 200ha of the Green14, or G14, sweet green variety to growers, which has also shown a good tolerance of Psa.
The proposed recovery pathway is expected to take at least three years.
“As a 100 per cent grower-owned organisation, Zespri’s focus is to facilitate the recovery of the gold category and assist the industry to return to its pre-Psa growth plans and sustained grower profitability,” said the company’s general manager of grower and government relations Simon Limmer.
“Any proposed recovery pathway which introduces a rapid transition to new varieties must satisfy a number of critical market performance criteria, including taste, quality and consistency, storage and market performance. Everything we do onshore must be balanced with the needs of our offshore markets with a view to protecting future grower returns.”
G3 and G14 are two of the three new varieties commercially released by Zespri in 2010. Over 1m trays of the two cultivars will be exported from New Zealand this season, with further supply chain and consumer testing underway during the year.
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