Australia has incited an international debate about food inspection and safety by proposing to turn the main responsibility for meat inspection in export-oriented plants over to the packers themselves.
“We see this as a way to move down the path of improving the quality of our product,” said Paul Morris, agricultural counsellor at the Australian embassy in Washington, D.C.
“We understand there is some sensitivity among our customers over proposals for change. We, of course, will wait to hear what they, and particularly the United States, have to say.”
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U.S. officials are studying Australia’s plans, as are food inspection officials from Canada and New Zealand.
“Along with New Zealand, we are studying the implications of this,” said Merv Baker of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. “It should be done within the next two or three months. Until then, we would not accept product that has not had the traditional inspection.”
In Canada, the proposal has stirred some opposition and divided opinion.
Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Jack Wilkinson said the government must be very cautious about buying into Australia’s private inspection system.
On a recent trip to Australia, he said there were reports about food poisoning and a constant stream of questions about how safe the Australian domestic system has become.
“We have to walk very carefully down that road,” he said. “I think we have to be cautious because of a clear consumer preference for having a third party involved in making sure the food they get is safe.”
The union which represents Canadian food inspectors has joined an international coalition of consumer groups and unions to try to block the proposal.
“The Australian proposal is a serious departure from the independent inspection system that has been adopted in Canada and elsewhere,” Larry Leng, president of the agricultural union of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said in a letter last week to agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief. “It is our belief that implementation of the Australian proposal will undermine food safety in Canada and internationally.”
Yet Chris Mitchler, food committee chair for the Consumers’ Association of Canada, said that if checks and balances are in place and the government monitoring is adequate, consumers should have no qualms about a move to private inspection.
“As long as the policing and enforcement side of it is adequate, I’m fairly confident it could be all right,” said Mitchler, who sits on a Canadian industry-government-consumer committee considering more private inspections in poultry plants.
The Australians say there are adequate safeguards in their proposed system. It has been in place for domestic meat inspections since 1994.
“We have seen the quality of our products on the market go up,” said Morris from the Australian embassy in the United States.
The Australian proposal is that, as a trial, most government inspectors would be pulled from five export plants which operate Quality Assurance and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points inspection systems.
The government role would be to have official supervising plant inspectors, and approving the safety system designed by the plant.
Morris said it would be safer because at export plants now, government inspectors do carcass-by-carcass inspections. The HACCP and QA systems will do a better job of detecting microbial contaminants.
He said there initially was consumer unease in Australia about a conflict of interest in having the plants inspect their own products.
But that has ended, he said, because the system has worked well domestically. Government supervisors approve plant systems and oversee the work of private inspectors.
Besides, “we have some of the strongest whistle-blower legislation in the world to protect employees who report it if other employers are not living up to their obligations.”
