Government has revealed there are several bio security issues with Australia and New Zealand that could take a year to solve.
While submitting the Ministry of Industry and Trade’s 2014 Annual Report to the Standing Committee on Economic Affairs, Permanent Secretary Shaheen Ali said a one fits all solution will not work when it comes to Bio security.
While some of our agricultural exports have gone through this process, government says finding a quick solution is always difficult.
” So there very sensitive about bio-security issues in the past and presently there is always issue of bio-security between forum island countries including Fiji with Australia and New Zealand. It takes too much time to discuss and agreed on a commodity pathway for a single product sometimes it takes years so a lot of aid that is geared towards trade is concentrated here when we talk about forum island countries and Australia and New Zealand trade towards resolving bio security issue”
Ali said that bio-security standards is always different for respective countries.
” The bio security issues is a fact that trade facilitator have to accept because its agricultural commodity have their own pathway and each countries valued it flora and flona very highly and they don’t want any damages to it, this is why this issues needs to be solved but not to say this issues should become a barrier”
He added that for island forum countries trading with Australia and New Zealand, it depends on the volume their are exporting.
” Australia and New Zealand have their own bio-security it is with their respective agricultural ministries sometimes the demand from other countries which may be given a higher priority because of the volume of trade so the Pacific Island have always struggle to be on par with this since agriculture is one of our backbone”