Rules ‘crippling’ honey industry
Rules governing what can be sold as ma¯nuka honey is crippling an industry that could be offering Northlanders a way out of poverty and a good income from Ma¯ori land, according to a Mid North producer.
The Ministry for Primary Industries, after years of disagreement within the industry, has defined ma¯nuka honey based on the presence of four marker chemicals and ma¯nuka DNA, and is standing by its regulations, saying it can’t take account of regional differences in the chemical makeup of ma¯nuka honey.
The problem, according to Northland producers, is that the level of one of those markers is different in Northland ma¯nuka, meaning some honey can’t be sold as ma¯nuka even if the bees have nothing but ma¯nuka to feed on.
Jim Ngawati, who owns Ngabush Honey, at Pokapu, near Moerewa, said his honey was fetching $35-$40/kg before the new definition was imposed. Now he’d be lucky to get $12, and he was “sitting on it” it in the hope that prices would improve, but some people couldn’t do that.
“A lot of people have just chucked it in. The last three years the weather’s been bad for beekeeping, so it’s a double whammy with this MPI definition,” Mr Ngawati said.
What really annoyed him was that big producers could buy his officially nonma¯nuka honey, mix it with clover honey, and it would pass the tests as multiflora ma¯nuka honey.
About 80 honey producers from Auckland to Kaitaia expressed their concerns to MPI officials at a hui at O¯ tiria Marae, Nga¯ti Hine chairman Pita Tipene saying Northland’s boutique honey producers were worst affected. Unlike the big players they couldn’t mix honey from different sources to make it fit the criteria.
“People like (Mr Ngawati) are really trying to make a go of it. They’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars setting up their own plant, but their value has been more than halved by the stroke of a pen,” he said.
Meanwhile, encouraged by the government’s Billion Trees programme, Nga¯ti Hine was training young men to plant more than 400ha of tribal land in ma¯nuka.
“Land that people have always said is unproductive because it’s covered in scrub has turned out to be a real opportunity. A lot of people have got training and invested; this squashes all that effort,” Mr Tipene said.
John Craig, a Pataua North beekeeper and former professor who manages Nga¯ti Hine’s honey operation, said the level of one of the chemical markers used by MPI, called 2-MAP, was highly variable in Northland.
“We know Northland ma¯nuka is very different. MPI’s own studies have shown that. They did the science, found highly significant regional differences, then ignored them,” he said.
“Northland should be the centre of the ma¯nuka honey industry — we produce the highest UMF honey in the country. Instead it has been crippled.”
MPI’s head of NZ Food Safety Bryan Wilson said he understood the definition was frustrating for producers whose honey didn’t meet it.
“A definition for a highly variable natural food product is by its nature going to exclude some product. That is its purpose. The key thing for the ma¯nuka honey industry is that we’re giving our markets and consumers confidence that will be valuable for the industry over time,” he said.
The ministry’s door was always open for industry concerns, but it had heard no evidence so far to make it change its mind.
MPI had developed the definition because the industry couldn’t agree on a way of authenticating ma¯nuka honey, and trading partners were concerned about honey being incorrectly exported as ma¯nuka, he said, adding that the definition had to be national rather than regional for regulatory purposes.