Apple and pear growers have finally notched up a win against Australia at the World Trade Organisation over use of non-tariff trade barriers to block the export of NZ pipfruit across the Tasman.
Sources say the WTO panel, which adjudicated the long-running dispute, comprehensively rejected the Australian defence, the trans-Tasman political newsletter reported.
Pipfruit NZ chairman Ian Palmer told NZPA the Government had received the WTO decision, but had not briefed the grower organisation -- though "that might change now that this has been leaked".
The trade row has been festering nearly 90 years.
NZ apples were first banned from Australia after fireblight was found in Northland, in 1919, probably after infected nursery stock was imported from California.
Australia first banned the import of fruit trees from New Zealand in the early 1920s when the disease spread in this country, and later the import ban was extended to all apple and pears.
Though New Zealand scientists have found fireblight in Australian ornamental plants and shown that the bacterial disease is unlikely to be transmitted on mature, clean fruit, efforts to gain access to the potentially-lucrative Australian market in 1986, 1989, and 1995 were rejected.
Further talks over the restrictions also failed when access was allowed in 2006 with conditions -- such as orchard inspections -- so strict that exports would not be economically viable.
New Zealand took a complaint to the World Trade Organisation in 2007, on the basis that the proposed constraints were an unacceptable trade barrier.
New Zealand has better natural conditions for growing apples and local growers expected to command the top end of the trans-Tasman market, but the drawn-out battle for access to Australia may have cost local orchardists the best of the premiums they expected to gain.
Australian growers have said imports of New Zealand apples could cost the major pipfruit areas in New South Wales $A30 million ($NZ39m) a year in lost sales, but since those estimates were made, the world's biggest apple-growing nation, China, has sought to also enter the market.
Biosecurity Australia said Chinese apples could be imported as long as risks from 18 pests of concern were a "very low level".
The pests included mites, oriental fruit fly, mealybugs, Japanese apple rust, apple brown rot, European canker, apple scab, apple and sooty blotch and flyspeck complex -- but biosecurity officials said they were satisfied China does not have fireblight.
New Zealand orchardists originally thought their path across the Tasman had been secured when in November 2003 the WTO ruled in favour of the United States -- using evidence provided from NZ research -- that the risk of apples in commercial trade spreading fireblight was negligible.
One previous Agriculture Minister, Jim Sutton, expected Australia to open its market without a major fight.
But Australia fought to the bitter end against New Zealand apples, even though it was happy to accept budwood for innovative New Zealand cultivars.
Domestic political lobbying has played a key role in previous Australian government decisions, but the latest news from the WTO has arrived on the eve of an Australian federal election, which will raise the question of how much influence apple growers can exercise in key marginal electorates.