Kiwi, Act II

BAY OF PLENTY, New Zealand — A three-story-high billboard of a hairy berry announces that this is kiwifruit country. Sure enough, driving into the temperate rim of farmland surrounding the Bay of Plenty, the country's pine forests, dairy farms and sheep holdings give way to a crazy quilt of orchards. Some 2,100 different holdings, covering 24,000 acres, are screened off from each other by towering cypress windbreaks.

Kiwifruit is not so much big here as mythic. The seeds that a traveling evangelist brought back from China in 1904 have grown into a $350-million crop, New Zealand's No. 1 horticultural commodity. Pass through an airport anywhere in the country, and the gift shops will be stacked with kiwifruit jam, kiwifruit chutney, kiwifruit jellies, chocolate-covered kiwifruit and sun-dried kiwifruit. The name comes from "kiwi," the Maori name for a small, flightless bird but is also synonymous with New Zealanders themselves. Just as Britons are "limeys," New Zealanders are "kiwis."

Why then are New Zealanders now insisting that their kiwifruit--the same familiar green-fleshed berry that they worked so hard to popularize--must be labeled with the computer-generated neologism Zespri?

The brand-name kiwifruit, they say, has become generic. In the first century spent perfecting the kiwifruit, New Zealand never patented its best-selling fruit variety or copyrighted the brand name. Since 1931 in the United States and 1970 worldwide, new varieties of fruit have commonly been patented, guaranteeing the breeders who develop them royalties to repay the years, even decades, of scientific trials that it takes to come up with a winner.

Even without a patent, the trademark "kiwifruit," if copyrighted, could have become the same kind of powerful marketing tool for New Zealand fruit growers that the term Xerox is for the U.S. photocopier company.

With the fruit type and its trade name left unprotected, Italy, Chile, France, Greece, China, Japan and the U.S. all started planting vines taken from New Zealand and calling the fruit "kiwifruit." By 1990 kiwifruit was as likely to come from Emilia-Romagna as the Bay of Plenty. By 1992 the glut was such that the market collapsed and the New Zealand kiwifruit industry had gone broke.

It was the cruelest of indignities. New Zealand was beaten at its own game, by its own fruit, bearing its own name.