Time to devolve meat inspection say processors

Published on Sunday 17 April 2011 18:27

A BLUEPRINT for a devolved meat inspection service in Scottish abattoirs and meat processing plants will be on the desk of the cabinet secretary for rural affairs within days of next month's parliamentary elections in Scotland.

That was the pledge given at the week-end by Alan Craig, president of the Scottish Association of Meat Wholesalers (SAMW), at the association's annual meeting and conference in Glasgow.

Meat wholesalers are up in arms about the cost and bureaucracy of the current inspection system operated by the UK Food Standards Agency.

The association's move has already won the support of NFU Scotland and Craig will be convening a meeting of all relevant bodies before the election on 5 May to finalise proposals for a Scottish meat inspection system divorced from the FSA.

"We obviously must have unity of purpose across the industry as we move forward," said Craig, chief executive of ANM Group, which operates meat plants at Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, and Twechar, Glasgow.

"There is already sufficient agreement and support to indicate that a Scottish meat inspection development can be placed on the new minister's desk within weeks, if not days, of the new administration taking office."

The FSA, under pressure from the Treasury, is seeking full cost recovery for meat inspection which could result in a 32 million bill for the UK industry, with two-thirds being passed back to producers.

The SAMW has been calling for some time for the FSA to increase the efficiency of its meat hygiene service to reduce costs which, the association insists, could be done without undermining food safety.

Wholesalers say they have been "appalled" to discover, following a Freedom of Information inquiry, that the annual cost of providing the meat inspection service in Scotland is 6.5m, or 100,000 per full-time equivalent employee.

"This revelation has come as a shock and a disappointment to our members," said Craig. "The FSA is a not-for-profit organisation with no sales team, factories, packaging, cold storage and fleet of lorries to support.

"It is a service-based organisation providing a crucial food safety service to the industry and the public but it doesn't need a USA air force style budget to deliver that service."

Annual turnover of the Scottish red meat sector is almost 1 billion and wholesalers provide 3,500 direct jobs as well as employment in downstream activities. But the industry is under pressure, according to Craig, and a bloated meat inspection service, which Craig has previously described as a "soap opera", is stymieing growth and development.

"The call for a devolved meat inspection system is a progressive and proactive move on behalf of the whole Scottish meat and livestock chain," he said. "It's time to break the mould. Our proposed solution will ease some of the pressures on our industry and could benefit from practical input from our industry, rather than excluding those who depend on product safety for their livelihood. It's a solution that makes sense."

A former vice-chairman of the European Food Safety Authority, Dr Patrick Wall, professor of animal health at University College, Dublin, suggested controls introduced at the height of the BSE crisis in the late 1990s could now be safely eased.

BSE - so-called "mad cow" disease which has been linked to new variant CJD in humans - was fast becoming a thing of the past throughout Europe, with only a handful of cases in very old cows.

But he admitted that governments and the industry faced a communications challenge to convince consumers that the protection of human health would not be compromised.

"The expense of testing healthy animals which all test negative is hard to justify when there are other consumer protection initiatives that the money could be better spent on," he argued.

Wall went as far as suggesting that meat and bone meal (MBM), widely blamed as the source of BSE, could again be safely reintroduced to the food chain.

"MBM was not the cause of BSE - it was contaminated MBM," he pointed out. "The eradication of the BSE from EU cattle herds removes the risk."

The feeding of chicken MBM to pigs and fish has been cleared by the European scientific risk assessment organisation as posing no risk to animal or human health.

However, the memory of BSE may mean that the public will never accept MBM from cattle being recycled.

But Wall said consigning MBM to cement works and incinerators was a waste at a time when there was a need for all protein to be utilised to feed the world.

But he added: "Public health must come before profit and any changes have to be science-based and explained to the public."