Knowing where your milk powder comes from
Here’s some more from Question Time in the house yesterday. The government has a longstanding position that Country of Origin Labelling on food is not a food safety issue and so it refuses to protect consumers’ right to know where their food comes from. That assertion that the safety of food has nothing to do with its country of origin has obviously taken something of a battering in recent days with the story about Sanlu putting melamine in its baby milk powder circulating all around the globe. All this led Jeanette to ask the Minsiter for Food Safety this:
Jeanette Fitzsimons: Can the Minister tell us what routine tests New Zealand applies for detecting melamine in dairy products imported from China; if there are none, how can she deny New Zealand consumers the right to know where their food comes from, so they can make their own decisions?
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL: No country routinely checks dairy products for melamine. This has been a situation that has arisen in China in respect of the addition of melamine in the chain of supply, and, as I made the point the other day, one of the products we found that might potentially have had dairy product from China in it had come via Australia. The product did not, in fact, have melamine in it, so I hasten to reassure people about that. But the product had the country-of-origin labelling that is required in Australia, and that labelling said: “Made from domestic and imported products.�, and therefore it did not assist in identifying whether the product came from China.
So the answer is that the government says you don’t need to worry about where your food comes from because New Zealand food safety standards will ensure all food is safe. Except when they don’t test for poisons like melamine. In those circumstances you’re not allowed to know either.
September 24th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Surely this is a great reason for people to Party Vote Green in order to continue to pressure the Government to do something about Country of Origin labeling and other food safety issues -especially since neither of the “major” Parties can be trusted to do anything about it.
September 24th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Liability for any problem lies with the NZ retailers, whatever the origin of the food. That’s a far better guarantee of quality than any origin labelling, which would not have helped at all in this case because the problem came out of the blue.
Stop using a tragedy to further your own xenophobic political agenda.
September 25th, 2008 at 11:13 am
“Liability for any problem lies with the NZ retailers, whatever the origin of the food. That’s a far better guarantee of quality than any origin labelling, which would not have helped at all in this case because the problem came out of the blue.”
Correct, every dairy needs to test the food they sell, or face lawsuits.
“Stop using a tragedy to further your own xenophobic political agenda.”
More PC nonsense. A label saying ‘Made in China” tells you what jurisdiction something is produced in - how is that xenophobic? Or do we have to pretend all countries have the same standards for fear of upsetting somebody’s feelings?
September 27th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
The Melamine scandal has a way to go I would hazard. I think our dairy industry is not yet telling all the truth.
According to a report from Yahoo News, “one of New Zealand ’s most expensive dairy exports, lactoferrin, which sells for about $500,000 a tonne, has been contaminated with melamine.
But food safety officials say they don’t know how the contamination occurred and are now looking at whether the melamine was in the raw milk.
Yesterday Mr Allen said the authority was considering any role which might have been played in the contamination by cyromazine, an insecticide which breaks down to melamine in mammals.
NZFSA has 24 livestock drenches and sprays containing cyromazine listed among registered agricultural compounds on its website.”
Also Melamine has been for sometime used in stock foods. Is our total dairy herd implicated?
September 27th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I suspect our dairy industry is implicated up to their eyeballs, although I doubt they see it that way.
There’s only one root cause for all these factors, from the use of cyromazine in various drenches and sprays, all they way through to the very reason Fontera bought into San Lu - increased profits at every stage of the process.
Our entire system assumes infinitely expanding markets to which companies sell ever more products from limitless resources being produced ever more cheaply creating infinitely expanding profits for their shareholders. Which would be great if we lived on an infinitely expanding planet….
I wonder why those Chinese farmers were watering their milk then fudging the protein tests with melamine? Could it be that the companies they supply to were squeezing their margins to the bone in search of greater profit? Fontera’s not part of that process, are they?
There’s two simple ways to increase your profits - put your price up, or reduce your costs. Or both, if you can get away with it. Isn’t that the motivation for nearly every company that moves their production to countries like China which have cheaper labour, less regulation, etc…? Lower costs = increased profits?
So is our dairy industry implicated? Heck yes! And you’d better believe that the day Fontera can produce and import raw milk from China cheaper than dairy farmers in the Waikato can produce the stuff, then that’s what you’ll be putting on your cornflakes in the morning. Only you won’t know, because you’ll still be paying the same price and there’ll be no country of origin info on the label.
But hey, it’s a New Zealand company, so the milk must be okay, right..?