Early Edition with Kate Hawkesby

What are you having on your toast this morning? Hopefully it’s some delicious Australian mānuka honey. If we don’t win the ongoing battle with Australia to claim the word mānuka as specifically unique to New Zealand, then we may well be having Aussie mānuka honey on our toast and letting Australian producers have their way.  There is a group of New Zealand honey producers who’ve not given up. They’re still working to trademark the term mānuka honey and they’ve refiled court proceedings in the UK and EU. This isn’t just some backyard group of apiary enthusiasts . They’re being backed by the wider New Zealand honey industry and the government.  The ‘New Zealand Manuka Honey Appellation Society’ has been working to protect the term so that only honey from New Zealand can be called mānuka since 2015. They’ve been here before and lost back in 2021. But this time around they say they’ve learnt a whole lot and they’re having another crack at protecting what is demonstrably and obviously a New Zealand name and produc