Kates update

Kate Hellstrom 400px

It’s been another busy couple of weeks for the Summerfruit NZ team. We’ve been liaising with many of our counterparts in other product groups and stakeholder organisations on the myriad of issues that we are collectively involved in. In the biosecurity space, we’ve attended Fall Armyworm meetings (see below) and a Government-Industry Agreement (GIA) Deed Governance meeting to discuss the re-negotiated Deed.

We met with Otago Regional Council to help inform the work that its Environmental Implementation Team is doing in the region. I’ve attended a number of meetings with members of the horticulture industry Chief Executive collective and government agencies (MBIE/Immigration NZ, and separately with MPI) relating to workforce and RSE issues, such as the cap and repatriation issues. RSE employers are receiving separate in-depth updates from the industry collective.

We will shortly be able to provide growers of Nzseries apricots with the final negotiated version of the Master Licence between Plant & Food Research and NZ Summer Fresh Ltd. We will hold a meeting, hopefully in late April, to seek growers’ approval for the Master Licence to be signed on their behalf. Expect more from us soon on this.

To keep you informed of these and other issues, we have scheduled a series of SummerGreen meetings in Hawkes Bay, Blenheim and Alexandra during May and June. I hope to see many of you there.

Contact details for the Summerfruit NZ team (myself, Andrea Crawford, Richard Mills and Tracey Mansfield) can be found here. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you need support or advice from us.

For specific subject matters such as accounts, biosecurity, export and research, please use the generic email addresses also on the staff page.