For some reason, fresh meat attracts health scare stories that can dominate newspaper storylines like no other. Cigarettes, salt, sugar, alcohol, drugs, etc., yes, get passing comments now and again, but mention fresh meat and hey presto – headline news!
A re-cycled item about links with red meat and bowel cancer was raised this week, this time by a Government sponsored review, and featured in the Sunday Telegraph. I guess it’s a sign of the times to see such a newspaper indulge in tabloid type journalism.
Consumers aren’t overawed anymore, though, and the average person in the street, although not dismissive, is not taken in by the hype, and seems much more relaxed in making up his or her own mind when these stories emerge. Having said that, one can understand why confusion can set in. On the same day, the British Nutrition Foundation issued a statement saying that moderate amounts of red meat offer positive contributions to a person’s diet!
So who do you listen to? Whichever way you look at it, the costs to British Agriculture with such regular negative press probably runs into £millions.
Not so long ago, our friends at the Food Standards Agency (FSA) would have got into the act by saying how the roles of vets and meat inspectors in abattoirs “protects public health”, although they have gone pretty quiet on that subject recently, as they certainly should.
The FSA now concedes that hygiene regulations in abattoirs are not “cost based and proportionate”. This phrase is bandied about as though it is a minor technical offence of no importance. Think about it. Uniquely severe hygiene rules requiring full time attendance of official vets and meat inspectors, at ruinous cost, are not based on analysis of the public health risk, thus excessive for the risk involved, i.e. disproportionate. Put more bluntly, health controls imposed and regulated by our competent authority called the FSA aren’t actually health controls at all!
Instead of searching questions being asked about this state of affairs, on ploughs this discredited agency in pursuing a policy of full cost recovery from the abattoir sector that runs into bankingesque proportions. Or so it seems to me as an abattoir operator.
I run a small family business and here’s the perspective. My company employs five slaughtermen and two butchers as part of its staff. They are top quality professionals who turn approximately six hundred animals per week from livestock into fresh meat ready to sell onto retail butchers or return to private customers.
It’s extremely hard for me to reconcile that when full cost recovery finally arrives, as it stands three FSA officials, i.e., two meat inspectors and a vet, will cost more per hour than those seven tradesmen combined. Imagine how I feel? Imagine how they feel!? Lunatics and asylum springs to mind.
Yet any time now the FSA will be announcing details of full cost inspection charges. And no doubt the industry’s hard work in the “consultation” process will as usual prove to have been a complete waste of time. It will be a sad day for the industry (and farmers and retailers) as another tranche of abattoir businesses face inevitable bankruptcy.
Apparently, proportionality is a key doctrine in EU law. Not so for the bureaucratic ambitions of the FSA. Do they mention it in despatches? Yes. Do they have the slightest intention of making it happen? No. Why oh why has this scandal not been dug into? Why has the FSA and its political bosses not been put under pressure to explain this situation? All they do is to ignore the facts and simply claim that their vets and inspectors “are there to protect public health”. They say this as they continue to put departmental targets above national interests.
We must front up. We have only ourselves to blame. We’re running around seeking support from the farmers and suchlike and indeed, we are going to need all the help we can get. But it shouldn’t have come to this. What’s to be done? Scientific and technical ignorance has been the fresh meat industry’s biggest handicap in failing to expose the glaring inadequacies of the inappropriately named “competent” authority (FSA). Get the right group of people together, and pay them accordingly. Every technical claim and comment should be scrutinised with professional analyses and response. Every time. Develop our own propaganda machine even.
It’s never too late. Let’s start by turning all previous errors on their head and reveal some home truths.
When full cost recovery finally arrives, what will industry do? How will it react? History is in the making for the wrong decisions should they be made.
To succeed you have to try.
Toby Baker.