WELLINGTON: The experts debate what we have to worry about most – and who pays for the protection. Oh, the brown marmorated stink bug! Forget Queensland fruit flies, because this – Halyomorpha halys – is the foreign invader which will be devastating our crops by next Christmas.
Up on the platform at a Lincoln University biosecurity forum, the experts appear to be playing a game of “name the most catastrophic agricultural pest you have never heard of which could shortly wipe out the New Zealand economy”.
That old stand-by of foot and mouth disease – an outbreak of which would be predicted to knock $10 billion off our meat exports over two years – is barely getting a mention.
Instead the guy from Fonterra is getting a bashing from the guy from forestry because of the way our farmers have left themselves so exposed to the gathering horde of international pasture pests.This is his number one worry, says New Zealand Forest Owner’s Association biosecurity advisor Bill Dyck.
The remark earns him a dark look from Fonterra’s risk management specialist, Dr Lindsay Burton. Yes, this rare, open-panel discussion, The Great Pest Debate, is throwing a light on both the myriad biosecurity dangers facing New Zealand and the tensions around how to manage those risks.
Getting back to the brown marmorated stink bug, a grey-faced Steve Gilbert, the boss of border control at the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI), is explaining how it originated in Asia and turned up in the US state of Pennsylvania about 15 years ago.
With no local diseases or parasites to control its numbers, a robustly varied taste for human crops, and a habit of over-wintering as colonies in people’s homes, stink bug numbers have exploded across the orchards and fields of mid-Atlantic America.
