By Pat McGrath, staff
The hepatitis A scare which has seen Chinese-packaged frozen berries pulled from the shelves in stores across Australia highlights the risks of an increasingly globalised food production chain, a trade analyst says.
Nine cases of hepatitis A have been linked to Nanna’s frozen mixed berries and Creative Gourmet frozen mixed berries, prompting a national recall.
The products were distributed by Australian company Patties Foods and health authorities say the source of the contamination has been traced back to China.
University of Queensland senior research officer David Adamson specialises in food safety in trade deals.
He said details on food sanitation requirements introduced in the China free trade deal were hard to find.
“Most people would be thinking that the food only goes one way, from Australia to China,” he said.
“Where in fact we’ve just seen here that we actually import a lot of repackaged or processed food from China.”
Mr Adamson said there were risks surrounding food safety in China.
“We’ve seen this happen with melamine milk, we’ve seen this happen with rat meat passed off as lamb,” he said.
“It’s a very important issue to China and they’re doing their best to stamp down on it.
“But we keep having incidences associated with chicken meat from China being exported to places like Japan [where it was] subsequently by McDonalds and also KFC – which causes enormous economic implications not only for those countries and those companies, but the people affected by these goods.”
Call for import regulations to be strengthened
Mr Adamson said if Australia wanted to import more food from China, it needed to change its regulations to stop safety being compromised.
“We actually have a very reactive screening process going on, but the question is how much product can we actually screen at any one given time,” he said.
“You’ve got an enormous amount coming in.
“As we keep reducing the amount of services that we put in this area, and trying to speed up the process and throughput, gaps occur and this causes unintended consequences.”
Health authorities have blamed the hepatitis-A contaminations on a processing facility in China, but Mr Adamson said placing inspectors at Chinese factories would be incredibly expensive and complicated.
“Then other countries would also like to have the same procedures where they can send an inspector to an Australian company,” he said.
“You start quickly seeing the logistics of this gets a bit messy.”
Mr Adamson said the solution involved setting strict conditions and requirements to export to Australia.
“This is what we use under the Australian import risk assessment procedure where we say these are the rules we would like you to use,” he said.
“The problem we have is these can be challenged either by a trading agreement or within the World Trade Organisation.”
Greens leader Christine Milne said the product recall highlighted the need for country of origin labelling.
“Currently this ridiculous label that says ‘Made from imported and local ingredients’ tells you nothing,” she said.
You don’t know how much of it is imported, you don’t whether it has only just been packaged here.”
Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce said he was making sure that the contamination incident was properly investigated.
“I’ll get a brief on this within a couple of days. I’m deeply concerned about this,” he said.
“This is all about country of origin labelling. What we have is a product that’s gone through a myriad of countries and arrived in our nation.
“It just goes to show you why the genuine Australian product is so widely regarded. (It’s) clean, green, healthy and keeps you safe.”
Patties Foods share price fell by 10 per cent today in the wake of the contamination scare.