Review advises closer watch on food imports

New Zealand needs to tighten border controls to prevent chemical residues and contaminants in food imports, an independent review has found.

The review, commissioned by the Food Safety Authority and published yesterday, recommends keeping closer watch on high-risk importers and foods.

It follows the lead contamination of an imported maize shipment last year.

Some was milled into cornflour which was later found to be contaminated at up to 100 times the permitted level of lead. Several brands of cornflour and one of custard were recalled.

The ship carrying the maize had transported lead concentrate on a previous journey.

The review said much of the authority's attention was focused on managing microbiological risks.

The lead contamination was discovered in testing of cornflour products for a Food Safety-commissioned Total Diet Survey.

It was not found in earlier testing of the maize shipment, which "showed nothing out of the ordinary because the contamination was not spread evenly throughout the shipment", the reviewers said.

This end-point testing for such contaminants and pesticide residues at the border was a hit-and-miss method - an unsatisfactory way of ensuring imported foods were safe.

The reviewers recommend beefing up the authority's current risk-based surveillance system by targeting specific foods, exporters and importers, depending on their history and risk profile.

"However, many food importers do not have formal risk management systems and this creates a problem for any foods they import from countries with no internal control systems. In the absence of such systems, end-point testing is the only alternative, despite its limitations."

Discussing cost recovery, the review said it would be desirable but impractical to make poorly performing importers pay some of the costs of the higher level of surveillance they needed. Levying all importers would probably be inefficient.

The authority said it would respond to the review early next year.

Mike McGuinness, managing director of Davis Trading, a major food importer, said last night that he supported the authority's food safety initiatives.

But he would be concerned if importers who had invested heavily in safety programmes were forced to contribute to enhanced surveillance of those who made less effort to comply with safety regulations.