Biosecurity is critical to New Zealand’s national security, economy and way of life

It feels rather apt to be writing this while in quarantine following a return to New Zealand from working abroad. New Zealand’s approach to biosecurity and public health management during the COVID-19 pandemic sets us apart from most of the world. This is not a sudden policy direction, though the application of the requisite risk management measures to humans has created some controversy. New Zealand’s freedom from many important animal diseases, and the biosecurity systems that enable this have always created challenges for the safe introduction of animals and animal products. Crucially, that privileged health status also supports high levels of domestic productivity in our animal-based farming systems, as well as market success for our exports.

New Zealand’s modern biosecurity system is world class. It is founded on a partnership between farmers and growers, supporting health professionals, wildlife enthusiasts and hunters, contractors, public servants and government. Crucially, it is a policy position that is entirely compatible with the Treaty of Waitangi and Te Ao Māori, which recognises the land, waters, mountains, plants and animals of Aotearoa New Zealand as taonga, and our role as kaitiaki.

New Zealand’s biosecurity system connects and articulates with international systems of food production and trade, of conservation and biodiversity, and of economic development and prosperity. This occurs through a complex array of bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral frameworks, including: an impressive and ever-expanding set of Free Trade Agreements; membership and leadership in international organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), World Health Organisation (WHO), and World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), and purposeful alliances with like-minded partners, such as Australia, Canada, the United States of America and the United Kingdom.

Changing threat landscape internationally and for New Zealand

These international dimensions recognise and respond to the benefits and risks of globalisation. Our understanding of the risk factors driving zoonotic disease emergence and spread is growing, along with their likelihood and frequency. Land use transformations that see humans and agricultural systems increasingly encroaching on wildlife habitats, create opportunities for exposure to previously unrecognised microorganisms. Globalised trade in agricultural and wildlife products create risks for disease spread. Rapid and unmanaged international movements of humans amplify the epidemiological impact for public health.

These are generalisations, and the complex natural biology and epidemiology of each emerging transboundary disease must be painstakingly revealed through scientific endeavour and collaboration. The extraordinary international collaboration since the zoonotic avian influenza crisis in the 2000s has enabled the establishment of targeted national and international surveillance and monitoring systems, with associated data sharing, that has delivered true early warning and response capability. Similarly, national responses to disease outbreaks with on-site investigations, depopulation and decontamination, tracing and contact case management, movement controls, biosecure business continuity, industry support and farmer welfare and market reassurance and recovery, have enabled best practices to be documented and trained for. Biosecurity systems have been proven as dynamic learning systems.

The international spread of African swine fever (ASF) since 2007 provides an example of the imperative of dynamic learning for biosecurity systems. The Global Framework for Transboundary Animal Disease (GF-TADs), a joint initiative of the OIE and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), established mechanisms to define best practices for ASF risk management. These have started to bear fruit, with the Czech Republic and Belgium demonstrating that control and eradication is possible in the absence of vaccines even when the disease becomes established in wild pigs. The spread of the disease in 2018 has stimulated an expansion of the GF-TADs learning network approach to support countries as they deal with epidemic outbreaks and evolving endemicity. The potential for further expansion into the Oceania region is a significant concern, driving heightened risk management and preparedness (Kurian et al. 2021).

Understanding the threat landscape is a central tenet of New Zealand’s whole-of-government, all-hazards, national emergency management system. Integration of the biosecurity preparedness system into this national emergency management system is a major strength, driving adoption of techniques such as threat assessments and situation reports and providing expanded capability and interoperability through the Coordinated Incident Management System (CIMS; https://www.civildefence.govt.nz/resources/coordinated-incident-management-system-cims-third-edition/). CIMS has demonstrated its value in enabling inter-agency management of both accidental and deliberate events.

The opportunities in data-driven intelligence, prioritisation and measurements of system performance

The information age has brought opportunities to understand, prepare for and respond to biosecurity threats. Joining official data from governments and international organisations, and using sophisticated tools for searching and scraping data from online media and social media sources, has demonstrated almost real-time capability to detect and track biosecurity events. Important donors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) have prioritised data-driven intelligence and performance of health and agricultural systems. BMGF has recently made a major investment in the modernisation of OIE-WAHIS (World Animal Health Information System), the official source of animal health status and outbreak information. OIE and FAO benefit from the WHO Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources system (https://www.who.int/initiatives/eios) actively searching the web for unofficial reports of health events in media sources and sharing information relevant for animal health. Modernisation of the OIE’s antimicrobial usage (AMU) system (https://www.oie.int/en/what-we-do/global-initiatives/antimicrobial-resistance/#ui-id-3) has enabled web-based reporting of national data on AMU in animals, probably the primary driver for antimicrobial resistance in animals (e.g. see Bell et al. 2016).

Health intelligence systems require information on outbreak events, but rapid risk assessment associated with those events also requires information on national capacities for preparedness and response. Recent expansion of the tripartite collaboration (FAO, OIE, WHO) to enhance the environmental dimension of the One Health approach by partnering with the United Nations Environment Programme creates an important opportunity to further complement event-based signalling and health capabilities evaluation with vulnerability assessments related to disease emergence (e.g. land-use changes and wildlife extraction and trade).

A further animal health information systems investment by BMGF and others will see the development of the Global Burden of Animal Disease system (https://animalhealthmetrics.org/). This has the ambitious goal of standardising methods for assessing the economic impact of animal diseases, creating a global community of practitioners using such methods and making the resulting data available through a sophisticated knowledge engine providing open access to core data and the products of analysis.

A long history of profiling and information sharing from New Zealand Customs and Biosecurity agencies has enhanced our ability to apply risk-targeting at the border. New Zealand’s risk analysis capability determines the risk management measures applied in import health standards, and these measures are increasingly applied offshore to manage risk at source. These innovations are central to New Zealand’s world-class biosecurity system, though achieving zero risk at the border is acknowledged as impractical and impossible if trade and travel are to be allowed. The border and post-border components of the New Zealand biosecurity system must work in unison to deliver the appropriate level of protection from risk.

Essential and new technologies supporting risk management

Many countries now recognise that creating the environment for such innovations to flourish is a deliberate result of a research and regulatory environment conducive to creating or identifying scientific and technological innovations, and then facilitating uptake, implementation and ongoing optimisation. New Zealand’s Food Innovation Network (https://foodinnovationnetwork.co.nz/) is a great example of such an ecosystem in practice. Why are we not at this same level of government and industry coordination with biosecurity innovation research and uptake in New Zealand? We should be, given the importance of biosecurity to the New Zealand economy. We have achieved good research coordination in specific areas, such as the New Zealand Bovine Tuberculosis Pest Management Strategy and more lately the national response to Mycoplasma bovis.

Diagnostics is often at the leading edge of technological advancements to improve surveillance systems (Buckle et al. 2020). Genomics has revolutionised diagnostic services and necessitates the linkage to information technologies because of the volume of data created. A decade of collaboration and data sharing related to influenza viruses allowed GISAID (https://www.gisaid.org/) to rapidly instigate a similarly impressive data platform for COVID-19 that has been critical to epidemiological insights into both pandemics. Point-of-care diagnostics are further exciting innovations that will require adaptations in surveillance systems, in particular to ensure well-considered diagnostic protocols that acknowledge limitations in the accuracy of different assays for decisions that have high consequences.

Livestock identification and traceability systems supported by technology in electronic tagging devices and information systems are not only contributing to regulatory controls within animal health programmes but expanding our understanding of the demographics and contact structures in animal populations. M. bovis exposed known weaknesses in the National Animal Identification and Traceability system (NAIT) but has also created the policy and stakeholder environment to address these. The fundamental importance of such information is highlighted through articles in the NZVJ Biosecurity Collection focussed on livestock sectors not covered by NAIT (Neumann et al. 2013; Rosanowski et al. 2013).

New Zealand has a strong history in livestock disease epidemiological modelling, in particular in spatial simulation modelling. Such modelling tools are best developed and refined in “peacetime” when there is time for careful validation and verification. They are best applied as policy setting tools in a cooperative way between industry, researchers and regulators to identify the most important policy comparisons to investigate (Sanson 2007; Sanson et al. 2021), although they also have a place during outbreaks as forecasting tools to guide response policy decisions. Rapid development of such tools during high profile outbreak scenarios invariably encounters transparency and communication challenges due to model complexity and inevitable variability and uncertainty of core parameters and model outputs. Decision support for animal health policy making through combining epidemiological and economic models is an exciting and promising field that requires true inter-disciplinary cooperation (Sanson et al. 2017).

No less important from a policy perspective is the recent focus on good regulatory practices (https://www.oecd.org/gov/regulatory-policy/governance-regulators.htm) in policy and programme development. At the national and international level, programme design and policy setting through co-design with stakeholders, developing the theory of change, logical frameworks, results matrices, monitoring of key indicators, and periodic evaluation is now the gold standard that regulators must strive for. It’s hard to get right, and a major restraint to diving in and moving quickly to operational implementation that emergency response often requires, but stakeholders recognise and appreciate the efforts, and the investment in these processes early in programme management proves invaluable in demonstrating performance against objectives in the later phases of implementation, particularly as costs mount.

Public–private partnerships for better biosecurity

New Zealand’s public policy is characterised by user pays approaches and cost recovery from exacerbators and beneficiaries. The biosecurity initiative of Government Industry Agreements (https://www.gia.org.nz/) is the latest embodiment of this philosophy and demonstrates that we have learnt that shared costs demand shared decision-making, the next level up from stakeholder engagement and consultation. The Bovine Tuberculosis National Pest Management Strategy is an archetype public–private partnership (Livingstone et al. 2015), and has been used extensively internationally as an example of such cooperative programmes with a high degree of industry ownership. New Zealand is well advanced in the process of re-defining relationships between policy-makers and regulators, industries and farmers, and consumers and markets.

Managing risks at source and the international development challenge

New Zealand’s biosecurity system is complex and multi-layered, and policy coherence across all layers is both a technical and coordination challenge (French et al. 2007). We dependent on the capabilities of our trading partners’ biosecurity, disease control and export assurance systems. For this self-serving reason alone there is a strong case for supporting capacity development of such systems in our trading partners. New Zealand has recognised the opportunities such investments create and has become an implementation partner in the OIE South-East Asia and China Foot and Mouth Disease (SEACFMD) programme. Many of New Zealand’s free trade agreements have a cooperative dimension supporting technical exchanges and scientific and regulatory capacity development, thus building international networks. Veterinary services in the Pacific, Asia, Eurasia and Africa have significant technical and regulatory capacity development needs, and the frameworks of international organisations like OIE provide a solid platform for technical engagement and support. Such investments are win-win.

Government and industry skills and competencies for a biosecure future

Veterinary services are a global public good, working for health security, food security, and economic development. Enhancing their competency contributes to this global good. The international frameworks of the OIE, WHO and FAO, including international standards and their respective implementation and capacity evaluation processes provide the basis for these competency developments. Avian influenza, ASF and COVID-19 have exposed strategic and technical weaknesses in the health security systems of even the most advanced nations. New Zealand’s veterinary services self-evaluation in 2015–16 using the OIE Performance of Veterinary Services tools exposed challenges in animal biosecurity coordination and surveillance systems, while recognising strengths in components such as border biosecurity, preparedness and response.

Within New Zealand, private veterinary practitioners remain at the coal face of New Zealand’s post-border biosecurity system and must be ready to recognise and react to potential exotic diseases in their clients’ animals. Private practice is subject to a variety of trends including: agglomeration of enterprises; challenges to rural practice profitability; and recruitment and retention issues. The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), VCNZ and NZVA have cooperated on policy responses to some of these challenges, but we must continue to address them in a cooperative and coordinated manner to ensure strong private veterinary enterprises into the future.

Last word

There is a lot to be proud of as a member of the New Zealand veterinary profession and for all participants in the New Zealand biosecurity system since it is world class, but we cannot rest on those laurels. The biosecurity risk landscape is highly dynamic and requires a dynamic response in our service offering leveraging scientific and regulatory innovation. I congratulate the authors of the articles included in the online Collection of the NZVJ that accompanies this editorial for their contribution to innovation in New Zealand’s biosecurity system, and I congratulate NZVA and the Board of NZVJ for promoting biosecurity through the online Collection. I’m proud to be part of our profession, of the time I spent in practice, and my 20 years of government service in MPI’s biosecurity system. I realise that being away from New Zealand for the last 5 years serving the OIE has meant this editorial has a particular bias. I hope the perspectives shared do not betray a disconnect with the realities of New Zealand life, and that the opportunity to inform on international developments is of interest and relevance to all New Zealand biosecurity system participants.