Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of tomatoes have already had to be destroyed

Perfection Fresh’s glasshouses at Two Wells north of Adelaide, which were temporarily quarantined to control the spread of the tomato brown rugose fruit virus.

In my 40-plus years in the fruit and vegetable industry, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was to stand in front of our employees and deliver the news that as many as 500 of them would no longer have a job.

What made this even more tragic for our team, was that the job losses should have been entirely avoidable.

As the CEO of Perfection Fresh, one of Australia’s largest fruit and vegetable providers and one of South Australia’s biggest employers, I have seen a lot of challenges over the years. The tomato brown rugose fruit virus (ToBRFV) is the latest.

This virus first emerged in the Middle East about a decade ago and has since spread to most continents. It can make some tomatoes, as well as capsicums and chillies, blotchy but it poses zero threat to consumers’ health and does not affect the look of smaller snacking tomatoes.

Examples of tomatoes affected by the brown rugose fruit virus. Picture: Department of Primary Industries

Importantly, overseas experience shows it can be managed without destroying industries. The US Department of Agriculture permits the movement of fruit even from areas where the virus is present. Only last month, it was reported that the European Union will shortly follow the US in easing quarantine restrictions in response to ToBRFV, effectively employing management measures rather than lockdowns.

In early August, Perfection Fresh detected the virus at our Two Wells operations north of Adelaide. We now know it came to us through a batch of contaminated imported seeds that were not stopped at the nation’s border through quarantine controls.

The virus has been detected at two other spots on the Adelaide Plains, although we know that the propagator of the seeds has customers throughout Australia. It’s hard to believe the virus isn’t in other states but, given what’s happened to our business, we could well imagine that other growers would be reluctant to raise the alarm if they find it on their properties.

Nevertheless, we take our biosecurity obligations extremely seriously – managing pests and viruses is what we do every day – so we immediately reported the detection to Primary Industry and Regions South Australia (PIRSA).

We hoped for a proportionate response from governments that was based on international experience with ToBRFV, which focuses on the management of the virus. To say we were disappointed would be an understatement.

A response proportionate to the risk posed by the movement of fruit would have involved quarantining the single glasshouse involved, destroying any infected plants and conducting rigorous testing to ensure virus-free plants and fruit could continue to be produced sold.

That would have saved hundreds of jobs. Instead, we got blanket lockdown of our entire operations and interstate bans on any tomatoes from South Australia.

The result? The forced destruction of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of tomatoes. We are currently in the process of pulling out and destroying seven MCGs’ worth of perfectly good tomato plants – more than one million individual plants.

Perfection Fresh chief executive Michael Simonetta. Picture: Arsineh Houspian

The financial and individual impact on our industry has been enormous. The cost to Perfection Fresh alone is in the tens of millions, with up to 500 jobs lost – and we are just one of many South Australian growers, most of them smaller and less equipped to weather this storm. I know there are some who will not survive, taking jobs and livelihoods with them.

The impact on consumers is just starting. Over summer, South Australia produces 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the nation’s tomatoes. Prices are already rising for some varieties and, in the middle of the cost-of-living crisis, the cost of one of our staple foods is going to jump.

In the meantime, we sit and wait, hoping we will be given some clarity so we can begin replanting in the new year.

What is the solution? We need targeted, co-ordinated national control measures based on science and international experience rather than an uncoordinated approach that risks sending the entire South Australian tomato industry to the wall.

We are urging the Federal Government to step in to provide this leadership before it is too late for many growers and their workers.

While Western Australia’s move last month to ease some restrictions on the movement of fruit was good for the industry, businesses like ours are still in the dark. We need all of the States and Territories to quickly align on national protocols that enable the movement of fruit in the first instance, and then plants. And we need the States and Territories to align on national protocols to allow affected properties to return to growing and selling fruit.

To achieve that we first need to urgently improve national testing to ensure decision-making around lockdowns and bans on fruit movement is fully informed. This includes faster turnarounds; it has been taking more than a month in some cases! The new testing facility that opened in SA last month will help but, frankly, it has taken far too long.

Finally – and this is not something I thought I’d ever have to raise – governments should look at financial compensation because of the impact of the lockdowns and the movement conditions imposed on affected growers and their workers.

As major fruit and vegetable growers, we are usually on a unity ticket with governments when it comes to the nation’s biosecurity. We want to keep out pests as much as they do. In this case, however, governments must urgently draw on international experience for how to manage a virus without destroying a valuable industry and the jobs in it.

Michael Simonetta is the chief executive of Perfection Fresh Australia