AHAP Progress Report Shows NZ Horticulture Building Real Momentum
According to a progress report on the Aotearoa Horticulture Action Plan (AHAP), New Zealand's horticulture sector is making real progress on the big issues facing growers.
The message was delivered at Citrus New Zealand’s annual gathering in Gisborne last month.
The two-day event ran in two parts: a full Industry Forum under the theme ‘Profitable Citrus: Backing Growth in a Changing Landscape’; followed by the Citrus NZ industry awards dinner, drawing growers, packers, marketers and researchers from Kerikeri to Christchurch.
The forum programme opened by asking the two questions the sector’s leadership says matter most – how to attract serious investment into citrus, and where the value will actually sit in the years ahead.
Dr Hamish Gow, who holds the Sir Graeme Harrison Chair in Global Value Chains and Trade at Lincoln University, made the growth case.
Drawing on a career studying how primary industries around the world shift from selling volume to selling value, and work advising bodies including the European Commission, the OECD, the World Bank and the USDA, he argued that what makes a sector genuinely investable is not how much it produces but the value and ownership it can defend.
Strategic foresight leader Dr Victoria Hatton then worked back from 2050. She said the squeeze on growers is structural.
Around 90% of New Zealand citrus is sold at home, roughly half (by value) the citrus New Zealanders eat is now imported, and imported citrus has carried a zero tariff for decades – so growers cannot out-price imported fruit, and no trade negotiator is coming to fix it.
The answer, she argued, is value not volume.
Pointing to kiwifruit, she noted Zespri export value grew far faster than tonnage from 2000 to 2023 – the difference being variety ownership and brand, not agronomy.
The sector’s real constraints, she said, are decisions it has yet to make: backing an owned variety, building a category brand, and proving where its fruit comes from.
The forum also heard about the value chain, market access and biosecurity, and a pan-sector outlook from Horticulture New Zealand chief executive Kate Scott.
