Chicken company defends products after GE claim

Chicken company Inghams Enterprises today declared its products free of genetic engineering (GE), after a claim by Greenpeace that tests on a product had revealed GE soy ingredients.

Inghams Enterprises general manager Mike Rozen said the company's chicken, coatings and marinades were GE-free "and have certificates of compliance from our suppliers".

"This was recently confirmed by the Food Safety Authority (FSA) in an audit early this year," he said in a statement.

Greenpeace said today a test on Inghams New Zealand-made frozen "Chicken Cordon Bleu" product had shown traces of GE soy ingredients. However, there was no mention of GE ingredients on the label.

The test for herbicide resistant Roundup Ready soy was carried out last month by GeneScan at AgriQuality in Melbourne, on behalf of Greenpeace.

"Inghams continue to import GE soy meal into New Zealand for use in animal feed -- and this latest test shows that Inghams are using GE soy contaminated ingredients in their products too," Greenpeace campaigner Steve Abel said.

"It's time for Inghams to clean up their act and stop contaminating New Zealand's food chain with unwanted GE."

Mr Abel said GE foods were insufficiently tested and labelled.

Green MP Sue Kedgley said the case should be referred to the Commerce Commission for investigation under the Fair Trading Act.

However, the FSA said there were two exemptions to New Zealand's GE labelling laws.

One was for flavourings making up less than 0.1 per cent of a final food, the other for an ingredient that unintentionally contained GE material where it was less than 1 per cent of that ingredient.

"From the test run on behalf of Greenpeace, it is not clear what level of GE ingredient was found in the Inghams product," FSA director of regulatory standards Carole Inkster told NZPA.

The FSA would ask Greenpeace for more information on the test.

The authority had audited 177 manufacturing premises and 34 importers up to the end of February, for compliance with GE labelling.

"We have continued to audit since then, as part a large surveillance programme," Ms Inkster told NZPA.

"Part of that would have included testing."

Inghams last year won a $40 million contract to supply KFC restaurants with chicken.

The biggest player in the New Zealand chicken market, Tegel, lost the contract after 30 years of supplying the chain.

In 2001, Tegel announced it was switching to chicken feed made only from crops that had not been genetically engineered.

Until then, Tegel had been feeding its chickens on soymeal containing an unknown proportion of meal from imported GE soybeans.

- NZPA