Professor Phil Bremmer1, Graham Fletcher2, Allan B Wolf3, Reginald Wibisono3, Bethan Shaw3, Nicola King4, Peter Cressey5, Milana Blackmore6
1 University of Otago and New Zealand Food Safety Science & Research Centre
2 Bioeconomy Science Institute and New Zealand Food Safety Science & Research Centre
3 Bioeconomy Science Institute
4 New Zealand Institute for Public Health and Forensic Science and New Zealand Food Safety Science & Research Centre
5 New Zealand Institute for Public Health and Forensic Science
6 Ministry for Primary Industries / New Zealand Food Safety
phil.bremer@otago.ac.nz
Tropical Cyclone Gabrielle devastated horticulturally intense parts of New Zealand just as apple, kiwifruit and many vegetable crops were reaching maturity.
Questions of immediate concern for the horticulture sector included: the risk posed by directly affected produce; produce suspended above flood waters on trees and vines; and how to determine the safety of produce in flood-affected blocks.
Challenges included: the wide-spread scale of the destruction; regulators and researchers needing to simultaneously address multiple risks; a lack of preparedness for an event of such magnitude; limited communications; disruption to the workforce; an inability to make generalizations across sites or crops; working amongst piles of silt; limited local or international guidance; limited knowledge of background microbial levels on produce and in soils; disagreement on potential risks and what to test for, and a lack of capacity for timely testing.
Donations of time and resources by regulators, researchers, and industry stakeholders, coupled with emergency funding by the Government, enabled best practice recommendations to be issued within 5-days of the event, plus desk-based and on-the-ground assessments to commence. However, a lack of capability and the challenging conditions meant that it took a month before well-structured food safety testing programs commenced. While all produce directly impacted by flood water was disposed of, subsequent testing indicated that risks from agrichemicals (pesticides, fertilizer) or micro-organisms (from silt, manure, dead animals) had not significantly increased, possibly due to dilution effects and the contaminants being reduced overtime by sunlight and rain. This presentation will expand on the nature of the event, and the challenges it posed as well as outlining the steps required to ensure that horticultural stakeholders, including researchers and government, become better prepared to deal with future adverse events.