Allocating Vote: Biosecurity - Towards an "Economics-Based" Approach for Setting Priorities for the Importation of Risk Goods

The New Zealand government (through its agency the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, MAF) seeks to mitigate the potential negative impacts of importation through requiring commodities that may pose a risk to New Zealand's primary production systems, human health, indigenous flora, fauna or biodiversity to have an import health standard. Given, potential import opportunities exist in a wide variety of commodities from many different countries, the demand for import health standards far outweighs MAF's available resources to develop them. Therefore MAF must have a framework that prioritises which import health standards will be developed. This paper briefly presents the framework MAF is currently using to undertake the prioritisation of import health standards and then discusses how the current framework could evolve to become more 'economics-based'.