Government regulators will start trials on Friday to hand over to meat companies responsibility for finding and removing "chronic and/or localised abnormalities" in sheepmeat, which has drawn protests from a union representing some meat inspecto
Government regulators will start trials on Friday to hand over to meat companies responsibility for finding and removing "chronic and/or localised abnormalities" in sheepmeat, which has drawn protests from a union representing some meat inspectors.
The NZ Food Safety Authority (NZFSA) has said that checks not important to food safety -- such as for contamination, wounds and bruises, chronic pleurisy, chronic peritonitis, grass seed, parasitic protozoa, and tapeworms -- will be taken from inspectors working for state-owned AsureQuality at three meatworks.
Meatworkers at the Alliance Mataura (Southland) , Affco Imlay (Wanganui) and Silver Fern Farms' Pareora (Timaru) plants will inspect the carcasses, and a double-up of the usual AsureQuality sampling checks will be carried out jointly by the NZFSA staff and nominated meatworkers, with increased monitoring by the NZFSA verification agency.
But the Public Service Association (PSA) said today criticised the transfer of meat inspection to meatworkers.
"This is like getting the fox to guard the chicken coop," said PSA national secretary Richard Wagstaff. "Having meat companies inspect themselves is equivalent to no inspection.
"An independent assessor is not at the same risk of being unduly influenced or pressurised by an employer as an employee."
Many export markets -- particularly the European Union -- had previously demanded inspection be carried out by independent government officials, and that official seal of approval provided quality assurance for customer countries, said Mr Wagstaff.
"These trials represent a dumbing down of the inspection procedure," he said. "Inspections will be reduced to looking for lumps and bumps instead of diseases.
"These trials will put consumers at risk of eating non-inspected meat".
Until 1998, meat inspectors and veterinarians working in meatworks were employed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry's quality management arm, but the vets were restructured into a verification agency -- later rolled into the NZFSA -- and meat inspectors, now known as official assessors, were put into Asure NZ Ltd.
The changes followed unsuccessful efforts by several National governments to deregulate the meat inspection and certification work. Those efforts were derailed in late 1997 when the United States said it would not allow imported meat to be sold unless each carcass was checked by government inspectors, to allay safety concerns.
Asure created a controversy at the time by compiling a secret "goneburger" list of 95 meat inspectors Asure management wanted to get rid of. At the time Asure described some staff as "bitter and twisted", "cunning", `"uncontrollable", and "old school", and it claimed that 16 South Island staff and 79 North Islanders were unfit to continue working for the company.
In 2007, the law was changed to merge into Asure another state agency, AgriQuality, which had threatened to compete for contracts to carry out inspection of export meat.
An NZFSA spokesman declined to comment today on the PSA criticism, but said the issue would be addressed tomorrow at a briefing by its director of market access, Tony Zohrab.
