Paul Dykes: Food safety in stark focus

Photo / Dean Purcell

In the final of a six-part series, Paul Dykes reveals a national survey shows quality issues and food safety scares are a constant risk to New Zealand's reputation

As a country that grows, processes and sells food products, New Zealand cannot afford to rest on its laurels when it comes to food safety, especially since the Fonterra botulism scare.

Farmers and rural leaders rate food safety almost as highly as biosecurity, a KPMG survey has found, most agreeing that our food safety system cannot be allowed to stagnate.

Professional services firm KPMG discovered these concerns when, in March and April, it conducted 13 roundtable discussion sessions with rural leaders throughout the country while researching its two-part KPMG Agribusiness Agenda report.

In part 1, titled Facilitating Growth in an Uncertain World, KPMG global head of agribusiness Ian Proudfoot says food safety was the second most critical factor for the rural sector, particularly as products can now be tested for minuscule traces of contaminants and toxins.

The KPMG report says respondents felt the industry must increase its investment in proactive research to keep pace with evolving challenges. It is critical the industry keeps ahead of the natural environment and enables science to guide market access negotiations and regulatory responses.

The events associated with the precautionary recall of whey protein concentrate that Fonterra announced in August 2013 came up in many of the roundtable conversations.

Although many believed that food safety was best managed by the companies which owned the customer relationships, since those customers would ultimately determine the food safety standards to be applied, it was apparent from the conversations that the impact of the recall extended beyond Fonterra and the dairy sector.

The view was expressed that the scare damaged New Zealand's reputation throughout the world because the participants failed to get the communication right. The KPMG report found support for the view that all organisations in the primary sector should learn this lesson once and for all -- because there will be a next time.

Perhaps as a response to the Fonterra scare, many of the industry leaders interviewed were uncomfortable that the regulatory environment appeared to be moving back to a "command and control" approach, rather than the more collaborative approach of recent times. They said it was important to retain sufficient flexibility in the system to enable companies to meet their commercial requirements. This was considered to be far preferable to regulations being set by officials, or applying a one-size-fits-all set of rules across the primary sector.