Newspaper reports in the middle of August that the British government was delaying publication of an official review of the integrity and assurance of food supply networks have raised fears that food security is still a major concern in the UK.
Professor Chris Elliot, director of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast, was asked to carry out the review in 2013 after the horsemeat scandal had been hitting the headlines. (This referred to the discovery of horsemeat in supposedly pure beef products such as burgers and ready meals.)
His final report had been due for publication on 22 July, but this has since been put back. Officially this is to allow the recently appointed environment secretary, Liz Truss, time to study it, but unofficially, according to The Guardian newspaper, it is because its findings will severely embarrass the government.
Professor Elliot had already submitted a hard hitting interim report which was published in December 2013. While the emphasis was on meat, because of the horsemeat scandal, the findings of the review could equally apply to fish due to similarities in sourcing and storage. And Professor Elliot did, indeed, talk to companies involved in the seafood industry such as Young’s Seafood.
According to Professor Elliot, meat which would be incorporated into various products was now being sourced from around the world and what had been a straight forward food chain was now a tangled worldwide food web. And that makes it open to abuse.
“The more complex the supply chain the greater the degree of vulnerability and need for careful risk management,” he said.
Criminal activity
Professor Elliot reviewed the various stages of the chain from raw material supplier to processor to retailer/caterer where criminal activity as he described it could occur.
For example, he was quite scathing about the paper-based audits now being requested by retailers among others, which he said were no substitute for properly trained auditors actually visiting factories, preferably unannounced. He was told that “a paper-based system is not worth the paper it is written on”.
He also pointed out that “both local authority and private sector audits are generally more concerned with food hygiene and safety than with fraud”. And by fraud he often meant substitution of one batch of meat for another, cheaper, batch; the practice of species substitution is still rife in the fisheries industry for this very reason.
At several stages in his interim report, Professor Elliot said that the review would be “looking at this in more detail in the final report”. And it is perhaps this greater detail which has caused publication to be delayed.
As The Guardian rightly says, cuts in government funding have meant that checks on food products by the relevant authorities at the point of sale have been scaled back. But, as Professor Elliot points out, it is up to everyone in the supply chain to prevent abuse from being carried out in the first place.
The multi-million pound food industry
