A high-level conference on manuka’s status earlier this month was met with a largely positive reception from Government officials, society spokesman John Rawcliffe said.
Rawcliffe and others in the industry hope a cash injection to protect the brand for New Zealanders will soon be forthcoming.
“So far, as an industry group, we have invested $1 million into manuka honey for its protection and we have already seen the landmark decision made in the United Kingdom where their Trade Registry has accepted the filing of the term manuka as a certification mark,” Rawcliffe said.
To gain more wholesale protection the industry, however, needs another $1.4m to get it filed and accepted internationally.
Once in place there will be a full insurance programme with Lloyds to deliver ongoing protection on the brand name manuka.
Rawcliffe said producers are buoyed acting Prime Minister Winston Peters who said Australians are selling inferior honey under a manuka label.
Peters said he did not understand why apiarists in Australia are able to get away with it and expressed a desire to defend NZ’s honey markets from Australian products.
British officials acknowledge manuka is a Maori word for the plant Leptospermum scoparium. While it also grows outside NZ it is known by different common names in those places.
“Having the United Kingdom say that manuka is definitively a Maori word is worth gold,” Rawcliffe said.
“It’s a very strong ruling.”
Cost-benefit analysis shows the returns from protecting manuka as a brand significantly outweigh the funds required to protect it.
A Primary Growth Partnership put a target value of $1.2 billion of exports on the sector by 2028 for a product with an average export price of $58/kg.
It has cost $1m to secure trademark certifications for the descriptor manuka honey between 2018-2020 with $4.5m required to protect and administer the intellectual property over 10 years.
The investment of $5.5m is estimated to deliver a 650% rate of return in 2028 and a cumulative annual return over the next 10 years of $2.1b.
Rawcliffe said the greatest value in the protection comes by ensuring other countries, particularly Australia, cannot use the term and risk pushing down the value of NZ manuka honey.
And manuka might be only the first in a suite of protected NZ-sourced food descriptors to come and the time is right amid so much talk of adding value and telling the NZ story.
“We have the whole suite of honeys, including rewarewa and pohutukawa, then seafood including hoki and even some of our cheeses.”
Protecting GIs is likely to be a key negotiation point between NZ and Europe under a post-Brexit trade agreement.
Special agricultural trade envoy Mike Petersen said GI protection of European cheeses is one of the big three issues on the agenda for visiting European trade officials to discuss with their NZ counterparts in free-trade negotiations.
“The risk right now is that the EU does not want us to use descriptors like feta or parmesan.
“But I don’t think there has been too much thinking here about how we could capitalise on it the other way around.
“Marlborough is protected but sauvignon blanc is not and why could we not have NZ parmesan or feta?”
Italy claims the most items protected under EU GI regulations with 294, compared to 245 from France and only 69 from Britain.
However. Britain has eight protected fresh meat products generating 40% of GI protected EU fresh meat sales.
Scotch Whisky remains the highest profile protected product, earning an estimated £5b a year, similar to long protected Champagne’s €4.7b.
