Although Free Trade Agreements have opened up lucrative export markets in Asia for Australian cherry and stonefruit growers, there are issues in actually getting the produce to the market. Missing quarantine protocols have meant that some growers are unable to ship their products.
Montague Fresh, one of the country's top three apple and stonefruit producers, is keen to start shipping peaches, plums and nectarines into its biggest market, China, but is still waiting on quarantine clearance:
"We still can't ship product," says Rowan Little, general manager of business development at Montague. "We've done a really good job of getting the free trade agreement in place but, even though there are no tariffs, we still do not have a quarantine protocol so we cannot ship fruit there."
Horticulture Innovation Australia's chief executive, John Lloyd, says gaining access to new markets from a pests and diseases perspective can be one of the lengthiest hurdles in any FTA.
A bumper cherry season this year produced a record haul of cherries, says Simon Boughey, chief executive of Cherry Growers Australia – with some 5500 tonnes exported or more than double the harvest in the previous season.
But fortunes from the record crop have been mixed. Cherry growers on the Australian mainland, for instance, have been unable to enjoy in the spoils because biosecurity restrictions prevent them exporting fruit to FTA-backed countries like Korea and China. Instead, Tasmanian growers, who are the only producers with fruit-fly free status, and the only ones approved to fly produce to Korea and China, have had a virtual monopoly on shipments into those countries.
That made the 2015-16 season a particularly lucrative one for Tasmanian growers.
Exports of cherries were worth an estimated $73.97 million this season, with Chinese buyers purchasing seven times as many cherries from Tasmania as the mainland, according to Cherry Growers Australia.
"The effect of the FTAs are fantastic – not just for cherry growers but for a number of horticultural crops," says Boughey, chief executive officer of Cherry Growers Australia. The Korean FTA introduced in December 2014 dropped the tariff on cherry exports from 24 per cent to zero, prompting a surge in exports from five tonnes to 250 tonnes in the first season the FTA took effect.
With FTAs now operational with Japan, Korea and China, consumers in those markets are eating more cherries than local markets can supply, even on a counter-seasonal basis.
The only way to export mainland cherries to Korea and China is through a lengthy 20-day "cold treatment", which involves chilling the fruit to kill off pests like Queensland fruit fly, and either shipping or air-freighting.
Because the lengthy treatment can adversely affect quality and taste, local growers are constrained in what they can supply.
If end-point treatments like irradiation were approved as a measure to combat fruit fly, growers could air freight their fruit to China and Korea cutting out the long shipment times. Irradiation treatment is approved for exports into Indonesia, and the Cherry Association is hoping to gain approval for product into Vietnam and Thailand too.
