Just days after lambasting his own officials over the Chinese meat freeze, Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy is himself under attack as the blockade continues.
Last week Mr Guy announced a three week-long Chinese block on New Zealand beef and sheep meat imports was effectively over.
Today, however, he acknowledged millions of dollars' worth of meat exports were still sitting in containers stranded on Chinese wharves.
Mr Guy said the problem was documentation issued by the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) on new forms which had been rejected by Chinese import/export agency AQSIQ.
This morning he said 245 replacement certifications had already gone to China and a further 1300 were dispatched yesterday.
"All of that information is now with AQSIQ. The indication is that any day now we'll see those containers starting to move."
He said MPI officials responsible for the bungle had apologised to their Chinese counterparts, ministers and the meat industry.
Having known of the problem now for the last two weeks, Mr Guy said neither he or the meat industry itself were sure how much meat was involved.
Compensation for affected exporters was "a discussion that the Director-General of MPI is having with the industry" but it hadn't been raised with him.
But Labour Leader David Shearer said with the meat still stranded weeks after the problem began, serious questions were emerging over Mr Guy's handling of the problem.
"This is a fiasco. Nathan Guy's been sitting on his hands, he's blaming his officials, you've got ask whether the guy should still be in his job if he can't sort this out."
It was "unbelievable" Mr Guy didn't know how much meat was involved or how much the delay was costing exporters.
"Surely he can have some estimation of how much meat is sitting on the wharves. If he doesn't have that information it doesn't give us much confidence to us about whether he can get the things freed up."
Labour's primary industries spokesman Damien O'Connor said Mr Guy had handled the issue, "appallingly".
"He's not been on top of the issue right from day one, he's not had the information available, he's kept making statements to the public and to the meat industry that reassures them but he's not met one of those deadlines.
There will growing concern, there's issues now with apples we've found out about at the Russian border so I'm fearful that the whole restructure of the Ministry for Primary Industries has been a massive failure and they're going to have to unwind that reassure some of our trading partners that our certification process is indeed above board."
"The Prime Minister has to take a serious look at how the minister has handled this issue."
- Adam Bennett of the New Zealand Herald
