Fi Roberts
speaker
86 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Fi Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
What do you do?
So my name is Fi Roberts.
I'm head of biosecurity at DairyNZ.
I've been in this role around two and a half, nearly three years now.
And I come from a UK dairy farming background.
And originally in 2002, I was working during the FMD response in the UK, which has sort of struck a passion for this work.
Yeah, 100%.
It does not have foot and mouth disease, and we never have had foot and mouth disease in New Zealand, and that's exactly why.
It's worth keeping on our radar.
It's a disease that travels extremely quickly between cloven-hooved animals, and that includes cattle, sheep, pigs, deer, and goats.
An outbreak in New Zealand is going to trigger an immediate halt to international trade markets, which is going to affect dairy, meat and other primary sector exports.
The economic impact is going to be huge, right?
So consequences would be felt right across rural communities and the wider economy.
We've done a little bit of impact assessments in terms of the economic impact assessment.
Some work suggests that it could cost up to $3 billion to actually eradicate FMD.
The readiness work we're doing is going to significantly bring that cost down.
That's the plan.
But also in terms of our export values, the estimate is that it could be up to $14 billion per year until we can get back to trade.
So either way, huge economic consequence.
The main thing that we want to do is, again, prevention is cheaper than dealing with the outbreak after it arrives.
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