It notes Labour and National’s contention that we have lots of choice is all fair and true if the you are looking for the sort of choice you get on TV gameshows:

How much are you prepared to hazard to find out what’s in the mystery container?

The two big parties contend that we don’t need to worry about food safety because we have the New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA) keeping us safe:

That name [NZSFA] doesn’t sufficiently describe its role because it has a second duty that the title doesn’t hint at. It’s also responsible for “the facilitation of international market access”. Not only protecting our health but also, as best it can, helping get our produce into overseas markets. The Greens want to remove this bifocal approach. That’s a good idea.

This is not to say the country of origin issue is, or should be, solely about perceptions of food safety.Might consumers want to support local growers? Might they want to shun produce from certain countries for broader social reasons like civil rights abuse? Or to favour others they hold in good standing? Might they even, and we hesitate to suggest such a trivial matter, have a simple flavour preference.

Many countries, notably Australia and the United States, have sucked up the cost, and the darkly described trade implications, of introducing country of origin labelling. They seem to figure it’s what their citizens want and to find that, in itself, compelling enough. In New Zealand, at least as things stand, MPs seem to regard the labelling as an indulgence that should be denied us. In that respect, maybe it is a Nanny State sort of decision after all.

The Greens are often falsely accused of banning things but the reality is that most Green policies are about protecting consumer safety or giving consumers greater access to information so we can make informed choices.  It’s Labour and National’s free-trade-at-all-costs policies that are denying consumers’ the right to make informed choices about what we buy and eat.

Because the New Zealand Food Safety Authority has found one New Zealand manufacturer has a melamine contamination.  But it’s not telling us which one. As Sue Kedgley notes:

The Authority’s lack of action must be leaving Prime Minister Helen Clark red-faced, as it directly contradicts her statement, made when the scandal was uncovered, that: ‘…I think the first inclination (for the Chinese authorities) was to try and put a towel over it and deal with it without an official recall. That is never what we would do in New Zealand.’

Towards the bottom of the NZPA story on the melamine story is this bit:

In New Zealand-made foods one potential contamination pathway the authority is expected to check is whether the melamine is a residue from pesticide sprays.

Chan King-ming, an associate professor of biochemistry at a Chinese university, told the New Scientist magazine yesterday that cyromazine, a derivative of melamine, has been widely used in China as a pesticide.

In New Zealand, cyromazine has been used in a pesticide called Veterzine, and in June, the NZFSA published a list of contaminant levels it will allow in animal products, and specified a maximum permissible level of cyromazine and melamine in 0.3mg/kg in sheepmeats, and 0.15mg/kg in poultry and eggs.

According to Prof Chan, cyromazine is absorbed into plants as melamine and has spread through the food chain in animal feeds.

“It is not just in milk products, but also in farm products and animal feed, fish diet,” he said.

Associate professor in applied biology and chemical technology at Hong Kong Polytechnic University Peter Yu said that though it was known melamine caused kidney stones and problems in the kidney, there could also be other ill effects in the longterm.

“These are ingredients that shouldn’t be in food,” he said.

If that’s occurring that is a huge amount of New Zealand food that is potentially compromised by pesticides.

It’s hard to believe that both the Labour and National parties oppose something as basic as our right to know where our food comes from. We have country of origin labelling for footwear, clothing and wine – so we can work out where our jandals and tee shirts come from – but not our food. Why on earth not?

Incredibly our food authority the New Zealand Food Safety Authority opposes it- it says it conflicts with our free trade liberalisation policy and could somehow interfere with our export markets!

What nonsense! Most exporters proudly display made in New Zealand on our exports – they say it gives them a competitive advantage. And all our major trading partners have country of origin labelling. So if it doesn’t interfere with their exports, how could it interfere with ours?

NZFSA says country of origin labelling should be left to producers to use as a marketing tool, if they so wish!

Can you believe it! So if it suited a manufacturer or retailer they could have a label, but if it didn’t they need not.

All other forms of labelling are underpinned by regulation – our ingredients and nutrition labels, for example. Country of origin labelling of fresh food should be the same. There’s virtually no cost in point of sale labelling of fresh produce and its simple to implement – just put a label near the cauliflowers.

So let’s get on with it.

Folks often assume once you’re over the acute illness, that’s it, you’re back to normal and that’s the end of it,” said Dr. Robert Tauxe of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The long-term consequences are “an important but relatively poorly documented, poorly studied area of food borne illness.

In New Zealand campylobacter is the food borne disease of the moment, with The New Zealand Food Safety Authority recently releasing its new Risk Management Strategy for processing of poultry.

Studies suggest that up to 90% of chickens in New Zealand are infected with campylobacter. There are three key points at which the risk of campylobacter can be reduced; In the kitchen, with safe handling and cooking of chickens, in the retail process in the shops with safe packaging and freezing, and at the very beginning by doing something about the infected birds themselves. Unfortunately while the code has many sensible plans for the first two areas, it lets us down on this third aspect.

As Sue Kedgley notes:

A higher emphasis should be placed on more hygienic methods of transportation to avoid cross-contamination between live birds. Campylobacter lives in the gut of the chicken and transporting them in cages stacked on top of each other will inevitably result in the droppings from birds higher up the stack contaminating those below them.

The spray caused by the rubber fingers of the automatic defeatherer is a major source of contamination from one bird to the next, as is the automatic evisceration machine. This machine pulls the gut from the bird, however, if not set to the correct size can tear the gut spilling the contents over the chicken and contaminating the machine.

And the consequences can be horrific:

About 1 in 1,000 sufferers of campylobacter, a diarrhea-causing infection spread by raw poultry, develop far more serious Guillain-Barre syndrome a month or so later. Their body attacks their nerves, causing paralysis that usually requires intensive care and a ventilator to breath.