Horsemeat scandal: forget the abattoirs
Monday 11 February 2013
Catching up on the stuff we were writing overnight, the BBC is retailing denials from the Romanian prime minister that his country's abattoirs are involved in the horsemeat scandal.
This is Victor Ponta, who, expressing anger that his country had been blamed, says, "From all the data we have at the moment, there is no breach of European rules committed by companies from Romania or on Romanian territory". Without even having to check this, there is good reason for accepting this statement at face value. As we pointed out earlier, the false labelling scam does not work that way. Most often, meat is legitimately produced and only downstream does it acquire a new identity. The difficulty for investigators is that, if the labels are fraudulent, and the meat has undergone an identity change, the actual indications of origin may be false. Just because either labelling or invoices say the product is Romanian does not mean that is the place of slaughter. Even then, slaughtered animals loose their identity once they are butchered in cutting premises, acquiring the "establishment number" of the premises in which the meat is packaged. At that stage, the meat could be from anywhere, even imported from third countries. Nor is that the whole of it. As this report indicates, processed horsemeat products are sold quite legitimately in Continental supermarkets (see below), which means that horsemeat will be legally held in many processing plants, and used as a product ingredient.  There is always the possibility, therefore, that substitution occurred in the processing plants themselves, with the paperwork doctored to suit. As we illustrated in our first piece, process workers would have no idea what type of meat they were handling. In fact, a process one day could be legitimate, and the next day not, depending on the labelling applied to the end product.
Just to make it even more problematical, retail packs may not acquire their final wrapping on the day of production, or for some time afterwards, and they may even be transported to another plant for final wrapping. And at no stage is anything illegal being done, right up until the false labelling is applied.
Some of these complexities are beginning to show with the Irish end of the horsemeat scandal, where the Irish authorities pinned the problem on Poland, yet the Polish authorities are denyinginvolvement. Thus, both countries (Romania and Poland) fingered as the source of illicit horsemeat are denying their involvement. As regards Ireland, there is even some suggestion that Ulster gangs could be involved, putting abandoned horses that are unfit for human consumption into the food chain. And, although this has been dismissed as speculation, putting Polish labels on the meat would be a good way of throwing investigators off the scent. Anyone with any real knowledge of the system will understand these complexities. Traceabilty for a whole range of foods, and especially high-value products such as meat, is a joke. Thus to suggest that you can police the internal market on the basis of a paperwork trail is a very bad joke. COMMENT: "HORSEMEAT" THREAD Richard North 11/02/2013 |
Horsemeat scandal: endemic fraud
Monday 11 February 2013
 Since this is no more than we have been saying, in recent posts, we could not disagree with his observations. "You can't get away from the odd cheat or the odd failure, but this is so widespread, it's endemic, it's institutional fraud right across the piece", says the noble Lord. "Thousands of people must be aware of what’s going on". And, of course, that is precisely the point. Thousands of people are aware and have been aware that the system itself is a fraud. Actually, although this is headed up by the Telegraph, it comes from the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme (07:51 am). The chain is far more complicated than it should be, says Haskins, talking of the "shadowy guys" in the trade.
Then, for me, comes the second bombshell. "There's a huge amount of form-filling going on by the way", he says, "everybody fills in forms to say they are doing the right thing but they don't actually go and look at the factory to see what is happening inside the factory".
The Telegraph however, doesn't understand the significance of this assertion and doesn't print it. And neither does the Today Programme follow through. Yet this is the crux of the whole problem. The entire food control relies on paper (the HACCP regime) and real-life checks have been removed from the process. Ironically, Haskins is a life-long europhile, so he omits to tell us that this is an EU-mandated system which has effectively wrecked the traditional basis of food control. Food law is an exclusive EU competence, so his darling EU is at the heart of the problem. But he can't bring himself to say so. About this, I spoke to a senior consultant in the food industry this morning. He told me that the effect of the system is to "hammer the good guys" while the crooks easily find their way around it. This is the classic sledgehammer to miss the nut. Thus we have Owen Paterson today reiterating that this "is a case of fraud and a conspiracy against the public, this is a criminal action, substituting one material for another". The longer-term problem though is that the EU system of food control is not capable of detecting fraud. It is based on the assumption that the operators are honest, and access to the food network can be controlled. The assumptions are flawed. The system is not fit for purpose. Thus, one of the tasks facing Mr Paterson is to look at the food control system as a whole, and to re-think the basic assumptions. This, doubtless, will bring him into conflict with the "colleagues", who will not be willing to admit the flaws they have introduced. On past form, they will instead be calling for "more Europe". The battle lines, are beginning to be drawn. It will be interesting to see how the fight shapes up. COMMENT: "HORSEMEAT" THREAD Richard North 11/02/2013 |
Monday, 11 February 2013
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