The U.K. government has delayed publication of an official report into the causes of the horsemeat scandal until at least the fall. This has prompted fears that it is not doing enough to protect consumers from food security issues and is trying to hide the fact.
Professor Chris Elliott (pictured), director of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast, had been charged with finding out how horsemeat had been incorporated into supposedly beef products undetected and then sold to consumers by supermarkets and catering outlets, 16 months ago.
His final report had been due for publication on 22 July but has now been blocked. Officially this is to allow the new environment secretary, Liz Truss, time to study it, but unofficially, according to The Guardian newspaper, it is being said that its findings will severely embarrass the government.
Cuts in government funding have badly affected local authority spending on food inspection and enforcement. As SeafoodSource reported at the end of April, an investigation by consumer organization Which? discovered that in some areas of the U.K. no testing at all was being carried out to check for food fraud.
In his interim report, which was published in December, Elliott stated that the emphasis on providing cheap food has led to complex supply chains which are ripe for fraudulent activity. In fact it was commented that what had been regarded as a food chain had become a tangled worldwide food web. And that makes it open to abuse.
While The Guardian, a leftwing newspaper, is keen to emphasize the adverse effects of spending cuts by the rightwing led coalition government, it should be pointed out that the retail and catering industries have let their own inspection regimes sink to a woefully low level.
It was their proud boast that they knew exactly where all the ingredients for their food products came from, but the horsemeat scandal showed that this was simply not true. In fact Tesco, one of the world’s top supermarkets, admitted that it had no idea that horsemeat had been incorporated into some of the manufactured “beef” products on its shelves.
As we said at the time, traceability systems that were supposed to be in place either weren’t in place at all, or if they were, then weren’t up to scratch.
To be fair to the supermarkets, they didn’t try and shift the blame. Justin King, managing director of Sainsbury’s at the time, publicly stated that they couldn’t blame the government or the regulatory authorities for the mess in which they found themselves.
Whatever the implications of not yet publishing the final Elliott report, it is still evident that the food sold in the U.K. overall is far from safe to eat. Both chicken and imported liquid egg have been implicated in outbreaks of food poisoning since the horsemeat scandal.
Not surprisingly when the report is finally published, the government will be pressed to take strong action on food security. As Elliott has pointed out, the food sector has become a “soft touch” for criminals who know that there is little risk of detection, and also no serious penalty should they be discovered.
He also pointed out that consumers have the right to expect that the food products they buy are safe to eat, and furthermore that the products contain what is stated on the label. And while seafood is generally regarded as being safe to eat when offered for sale in a modern supermarket or catering outlet, trying to pass off one species as another is a common occurrence, as is the practice of adulteration by adding excess water to frozen products.
Many consumers don’t know that they are being duped in this respect, but if they do find out they will act as they did when they discovered that they were eating horsemeat instead of beef — sales of beef products from supermarkets plummeted.
