Industrial kiwifruit - the typhoid connection

Non-industrial kiwifruit growing 
and picking at home. 











  Typhoid fever is a very unpleasant bacterial disease, which if not treated quickly can be fatal. It is prevalent in parts of the world which have poor sanitation systems, and poor public health systems which do not monitor for the disease and act quickly to control outbreaks. In the nineteenth century New Zealand and Australia were such countries; in the twenty-first century our Pacific Island neighbours still suffer from a medium prevalence of the disease (10-100 cases per 100,000 people) every year. (These and other facts about the global prevalence of typhoid can be found in the WHO report The global burden of typhoid fever.)

Kiwifruit are a very pleasant fruit, with their hairy skins concealing sweet green or gold flesh, which is (if properly grown) highly nutritious. The kiwifruit plant (Actinidia spp), is native to southern China, and its seeds were first brought to New Zealand in the early twentieth century. A New Zealand cultivar, Hayward, was developed in the 1920s, commercial growing began in the Bay of Plenty in the 1930s, and the first exports of kiwifruit left NZ for England in 1952.

At this stage the fruit was still known by the name first used in New Zealand – Chinese gooseberry. Its name was changed to kiwifruit in 1959 when exports to North America began. The exporters wanted a distinctive name and were told by an American importer to stay away from 'melonettes' and anything with 'berry' in the name, because melon and berries attracted high import duties in the USA at that time. Since trade was the aim of the game, kiwifruit they became.

But whatever they were called, who would buy this unfamiliar fruit? In 1962, over thirty years before US exporters began their government-subsidised marketing campaign for out-of-season American stone fruit in New Zealand, importers and NZ exporters collaborated to create a market for kiwifruit in the US and elsewhere. They kept at it for years, enlisting the help of chefs, government ministers, and anyone else who would promote the fruit, until by the late 1970s kiwifruit was a boom industry. The price of kiwifruit-growing land in the Bay of Plenty reached an all-time high, commercial kiwifruit growing expanded to other parts of New Zealand, and Queen St farmers¹ were rushing to put their money into kiwifruit orchards.

The kiwifuit bonanza bubble burst in the usual way for the usual reasons in the late 1980s, and quite a few Queen St farmers became, if not exactly shirtless, then at least no longer able to buy designer shirts. What was now an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars in export trade was restructured in 1988 with the establishment of the New Zealand Kiwifruit Marketing Board, which was given monopoly powers to distribute and market kiwifruit everywhere except Australia. In 2000 it adopted the corporate identity ZESPRI International Ltd, and it is this entity which on May 13 announced that its export markets need not fear that they would be receiving fruit contaminated with typhoid, because

''ZESPRI has a highly sophisticated supply chain with quality traceability systems and this has allowed us to quickly identify the location of fruit and isolate it. As a result around 100,000 trays of export kiwifruit have been withdrawn from the supply chain and options to dispose of it are being worked through.''

Those 100,000 trays represented less than 0.1 percent of the 2011 exports. ZESPRI expects to export over 100 million trays of kiwifruit this year worth around NZ$ 1 billion. Nevertheless, it was still NZ$800,000 down the drain. How and why did it happen?

The short answer is that a worker infected with typhoid may have touched those fruit. The long answer is: since 2007 New Zealand has had an official strategy (the Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme) of recruiting foreign labour, mostly from the Pacific Islands, for the horticulture and viticulture industries. Around 8,000 workers are currently coming to NZ every year for these purposes. The workers are allowed to work seven months in every eleven, and mostly pick NZ's big export crops - kiwifruit, apples and grapes. (The grapes are exported as wine.)

A 2010 University of Waikato/World Bank study found that per capita incomes of households sending workers were approximately 40% higher than for matched households without seasonal workers. The study found that those receiving this income were more likely to make dwelling improvements and make major purchases of durable goods, while in Tonga older teenagers in seasonal worker households were more likely to be in secondary school. So it is a good scheme, then?

For increasing the number of television sets in Pacific Island homes, very likely. For making a real and lasting difference to the health and wellbeing of the Pacific Islands, probably not. For the 'public good' part of these workers' wages, i.e. the taxes they pay to provide public goods and services, such as sanitation systems and public health systems, stays in New Zealand and benefits New Zealanders, while the sanitation and public health standards in their home towns and villages in the Pacific remain low for lack of funding. Hence, typhoid fever is still a common disease in the Pacific, and it comes to New Zealand from those who live or travel there.

But this economic opportunity for (some) Islanders and threat to (some) New Zealanders may be short-lived in any case. In December 2009 the inventor of automated robotic kiwifruit picking and packing machines, Dr Rory Flemmer, was named engineering innovator of the year at the New Zealand Engineering Excellence Awards in Wellington. These machines can outpick and outpack any humans in any given hour – and they can do it 24/7. The system was developed with Zespri, which was concerned that a lack of labour to pick and pack kiwifruit was hurting the industry. And machines don't get typhoid fever...

...now, what was the point of kiwifruit again? A fantastically nutritious and delicious addition to the winter diet (if grown locally and organically) – or a billion dollar industry with some very big ecological and social downsides?²

1. Queen St farmers are businesspeople and investors who invest in primary industries but don't do any farm work. Queen St is the main street in Auckland.
2. Such as the heaviest use of synthetic pesticides and heavy use of non-sustainable fertilisers.