Labelling fraud alarms MAF

The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry is moving to stop unscrupulous traders in countries with mad cow disease labelling their meat as of New Zealand origin.

Food assurance authority director Andrew McKenzie said counterfeiting of meat had been sufficiently worrying for the ministry to develop an electronic certification system, which it hoped to have fully operational by July.

A spokeswoman for Agriculture Minister Jim Sutton said the system would clearly identify meat from New Zealand, certifying its quality and safety.

It would be extremely difficult to counterfeit the certificates.

Dr McKenzie said the system was designed in case traders in some countries with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) labelled their meat as coming from New Zealand to gain access to other markets.

BSE has been linked to the degenerative and eventually fatal brain condition new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Many countries - including New Zealand - have banned meat and meat products from Europe as a result of BSE, which has been most prevalent in Britain and Germany.

Dr McKenzie said New Zealand was the "freest of the free" regarding BSE, but in one respect its pristine image had backfired. "People are trading fraudulently using New Zealand certificates into some markets."

Germany was mentioned as one European source of the deception, with the "clean New Zealand" meat typically sent to the Middle East, including Jordan and Lebanon.

Animal products director Tony Zohrab said that "anecdotally" the number of frauds appeared to have grown in tandem with the BSE scare.

There were only two or three identified cases a year, but some of those, notably one involving exports to Jordan, had been sizeable, and it was likely that other instances were escaping attention.

"Other people are seeing advantage in claiming their product is of New Zealand origin," Dr Zohrab said.

"Certificates are generated using scanners, some very sophisticated."

The frauds were difficult to act against, largely because New Zealand law held no currency in Europe or the Middle East.

Added Dr McKenzie: "The downside of our reputation as a good supplier and being disease-free is that other people want to play on that advantage."

Risk analysis manager Stuart MacDiarmid conceded that although New Zealand was almost certainly BSE-free, more could be done in the area of surveillance and monitoring.

He said the present regime tested 300 animals a year.

- NZPA