21 Mar 2013 DTI proposes tougher meat labelling laws

In the wake of the meat labelling scam that erupted in Europe and locally, the Department of Trade and Industry will soon publish proposals to strengthen the labelling of meat products so that their ingredients are identified more precisely, reports Fin24.com.

The European scandal turned to interest South Africans when renewed publicity was given a study conducted by the University of Stellenbosch found that meat products found in supermarkets did not correctly label the type of meat that they contained.

Unidentified meat such as donkey‚ kangaroo and water buffalo was found in products labelled for example beef.

Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies said at a media briefing yesterday [20 March] that the department intended to strengthen the regulations regarding meat labelling so that labels indicated the animal from which the meat was derived.

The proposals to amend the regulations will be published in the government gazette later this week‚ he said.

He stressed the importance of respecting the rights of consumers to know what they were eating‚ especially where consumers insisted on halaal or kosher food products. “The existing labelling requirements are perhaps not strong enough‚” he said. “There is perhaps a need for stronger definitions.”

Davies said he had also asked the National Consumer Commission to investigate the parties involved in introducing wrongly labelled meat products into the South African market and to determine whether there had been any violations of regulations.

The view of the department was that the incorrectly labelled meat products were mostly imports that had entered SA through the international trade in processed meat products.

It did not appear that there had been any health safety issues related to the meat labelling scandal.

The Consumer Goods Council SA has, meanwhile, expressed confidence that its major retail and independent suppliers were committed to ethical and legal meat practices. It however said the report was a timely wake-up call with regard to compliance with food labelling standards.

Dave Ford, chairperson of the Red Meat Industry Forum, which represents the national red meat chain, said it conducted tests on its own meat products.

“[We] use an independent auditing company to do meat inspections nationally at red meat abattoirs, to ensure that [our] meat is safe for the consumer,” said Ford.

“Once the meat products leave the abattoir they are under the jurisdiction of the department of health… [which] has sufficient legislation at their disposal to enforce compliance at point of sale”.

Three of the country’s biggest supermarket chains have also reassured the public that their meats are safe.

Pick n Pay’s Tamra Veley said the retail chain had very strict quality control measures in place, which included supplier warranties, spot checks by their food technologists and spot DNA testing. 

Woolworths also said it was not affected by the latest contamination scandal.

“We have steps in place to ensure the integrity of our food. We work with specific producers who share our values, we specify our product recipes and, for critical raw materials such as meat, we specify which sources our suppliers are allowed to source from.

“To verify the effectiveness of these controls we perform random checks, such as DNA testing,” Woolworths said.

Shoprite group chief executive Whitey Basson welcomed the SU food study.

“We do not believe that any of our suppliers, who are reputable companies, would transgress food standards and labelling regulations,” said Basson.

He added that should any of their suppliers be implicated in the study, “Shoprite will penalise them in the strongest terms”.

Source: Fin24.com

Additional reading:

No name and shame of meat culprits

Despite consumers baying for blood, the food researcher who exposed the meat scandal refuses to name and shame the suppliers, retailers and butchers whose products were tested.

“The focus of our research was not to name and shame, but rather to force corrective action,” said Prof Louw Hoffman, co-author of the shocking study that revealed 68% of processed meat products sold in South Africa contained donkey, goat and water buffalo meat…..