Australian pipfruit organisations are still questioning the safety of New Zealand apples, despite a World Trade Organisation (WTO) interim report apparently indicating a win for local growers.
New Zealand apples and pears have been banned from being imported to Australia since a breakout of fireblight in Northland in 1919.
In 2007 the New Zealand government took a complaint to the WTO arguing Australia was effectively imposing a trade embargo.
A leaked interim WTO document on the non-tariff barriers to New Zealand pipfruit has indicated a favourable response to the New Zealand argument.
But an Australian grower organisation said there were still issues over the safety of New Zealand fruit being imported into the country.
Apple and Pear Australia general manager Tony Russell told Radio New Zealand there were still unanswered questions about how fireblight was transmitted.
He said its introduction would be particularly disastrous for Australia because it would be likely to spread quickly in the warm climate.
"It would be quite devastating particularly for pears, which are quite susceptible to fireblight. But it would also be a problem in increased costs of management of another disease that we don't want -- so why take on more diseases if you can avoid it?"
Australia's Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry said the dispute had not been finalised and the interim report was simply a step in the process.
Prime Minister John Key this morning told NZPA an end to the dispute would be welcomed.
"I haven't seen the report and I have to emphasise it is an interim report, but I am ever hopeful that we will find a resolution to this long-standing problem."
The Government has declined to confirm details of the WTO report.
However, the trans-Tasman political newsletter said it had received a draft of the report, which represented a spectacular win for New Zealand growers and that the WTO panel "comprehensively rejected" the Australian defence.
Pipfruit NZ chairman Ian Palmer said the Government had received the decision, but had not briefed the grower organisation -- though "that might change now that this has been leaked".
The final report, due around the middle of the year, would be released publicly, a Government spokeswoman said. Either side could then appeal, and then both countries would have to negotiate a technical agreement.
The pipfruit trade row between the two countries has been festering nearly 90 years.
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.
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.
