During the Commerce Commission's market study into groceries, Coriolis Consulting put up a chart with some thumb-suck order-of-magnitude estimates on costs here.
I was reminded of that reading this BusinessDesk piece on on biosecurity rules around blueberry imports.
Annual revenue for the sector is about $150m.
Peru exports a lot of blueberries to the US. Wholesale prices there are around $6.60 USD/kg, so about $13 NZD per kilo if you include GST.
Here the things run about $10-$12 per punnet, or maybe $80-$96/kg.
Air freight and logistics for getting blueberries from Peru to here would add a lot of cost.
Imagine a bad-case outcome where a biosecurity failure means the complete end of NZ blueberry production and we had to rely on imports from Peru and Chile (which somehow manage to have production despite being subject to whatever NZ is worried about).
How high does the probability of that outcome have to be for our current biosecurity rules to make cost-benefit sense? Is it really just religion?
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