Port of Tauranga chief executive Leonard Sampson has warned that the country’s busiest container port is already at capacity and may struggle to clear this season’s record kiwifruit harvest, with the long-awaited Stella Passage wharf extension still working its way through a fast-track approvals process now into its seventh year.
Speaking to RNZ this week, Sampson said the port had been forced to turn away international shipping services and could not accept any additional container vessels at the existing terminal. “We’re at capacity at the moment and unfortunately we’re unable to take any further container vessels at the container terminal,” he said.
That capacity ceiling matters because more than half of New Zealand’s containerised exports leave the country through Mount Maunganui. Around 95 percent of Zespri’s New Zealand kiwifruit is shipped from the Port of Tauranga and roughly 80 percent of the crop is grown in the surrounding Bay of Plenty. About 30 percent of the country’s export logs also pass through the port, alongside what Sampson described as currently strong red meat volumes heading into Asian markets.
Orchardists are expected to produce about 220 million trays this season, or roughly 6.6 billion individual pieces of fruit, in what Zespri describes as one of the largest crops ever loaded out of Tauranga. Sampson said the port had been forced to turn away an international shipping service that would have delivered between 70 million dollars and 90 million dollars in ocean freight savings to New Zealand exporters and importers, because there was simply no berth available to dock the extra ships when they wanted to call.
The squeeze comes as Zespri pushes ahead with a published plan to double its export volumes within the next decade. In a statement on Thursday backing the Western Bay of Plenty Regional Deal, Zespri chief executive Jason Te Brake said port connectivity and the Port of Tauranga extension were among the critical bottlenecks that needed to be resolved if the industry was to meet future demand. He warned that infrastructure constraints already existed and would only worsen without intervention from both central and local government.
The most contentious of those constraints is the long delayed Stella Passage development, which would extend the Sulphur Point container wharves by 385 metres in two stages and the Mount Maunganui wharves by another 315 metres, all on land already inside the port’s existing footprint. The expansion would also add four new ship-to-shore cranes at Sulphur Point and is regarded by Port of Tauranga as essential to handling the next decade of trade growth out of the Bay.
After more than seven years of consenting, the Environmental Protection Authority has reappointed an expert panel under the Fast Track Approvals Amendment Act 2025 to consider a fresh application. The panel, chaired by Bronwyn Carruthers KC alongside Hugh Leersnyder and James Whetu, began its work on 16 March 2026 and is due to release a decision on 7 September 2026. The Mount Maunganui wharf extension had earlier been left out of the fast-track legislation by a drafting error, which the Government has since corrected through amendment.
Local iwi Ngāti Kuku and Ngā Hapū o Ngā Moutere have opposed previous versions of the project, raising concerns about further dredging in the harbour and the cumulative impact of reclamation near sites of cultural significance. The expert panel will weigh those submissions alongside the port’s economic case before issuing its determination in the spring.
Port of Tauranga is publicly listed and majority owned by the Bay of Plenty Regional Council. It handled 50 percent of New Zealand’s containerised exports in the last full year and is the only port in the country regularly handling the larger 8,000 TEU plus container vessels that the main shipping lines now deploy on the Asia and North America trades. If the Stella Passage approval is granted in September, construction would still take several years to complete, meaning the next two or three seasons must all be loaded through the existing wharves regardless.
Zespri said its plans for new orchard developments and processing capacity in the western Bay of Plenty were also dependent on supporting housing, roading and seasonal worker infrastructure, including for Recognised Seasonal Employer staff who arrive each picking season. Failing to address those issues, the company warned, would put further pressure on a freight network that is already running hot through the autumn export window. For now, exporters will be hoping the panel signs off the wharf extension on time so the country’s biggest single horticultural earner can keep moving fruit to market before next year’s harvest arrives at the wharf gate.
What do you reckon, should the Government be cutting through faster on infrastructure approvals like this, or are the iwi concerns about the harbour valid grounds for slowing the expansion down? Let us know in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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