The Hepatitis A and Scombroid outbreaks are not just about labelling.

With the Hepatitis A outbreak continuing to grow and tuna from overseas being involved in a Scombroid food poisoning, there are many calls for a review to food labelling.

There are two issues here, however, the first is about the safety of food coming from overseas and the second is about the labelling of food from other countries.

The Agriculture Minister, Barnaby Joyce, amongst other ministers has requested that Food Standards Australia New Zealand start an immediate review of what is known as “Country of Origin Labelling” (CoOL).

Australians are known for being very patriotic and wanting to buy food from this country. However, for most of us Aussies, when shopping it is always the price that determines the vast majority of purchases and this means manufacturers need to keep prices down to improve the likelihood of the sale.

To keep prices down, it is essential to purchase ingredients that cost less. Australian ingredients are generally high quality and safe, however they usually cost more than equivalent overseas material – primarily due to our wages.

This is why many manufacturers purchase and use overseas ingredients. They know that these materials must meet the same food safety standards as Australian ingredients and will put controls in place to ensure this. However, sometimes the supplier in the other country ends up doing the wrong thing or the growing is done incorrectly and the material comes into the country not meeting the Food Safety Standards. This is what happened in the case of the recent berries and the Hepatitis A outbreak.

This is a very different issue to the labelling of the food, and must be handled completely separately. There has been a call to label food from overseas as something that could potentially cause injury and that is a purely emotional reaction to a single case.

There are thousands of tonnes of ingredients coming into this country ever year and very few of them will not meet the requirements of the Code and therefore potentially cause harm. This is a real issue but it needs to be addressed in a scientific manner without emotions and the public needs to understand that there may be an increase in prices to allow for this to be done.

So the labelling review.

CoOL was included in the huge Food Labelling Review a few years ago and the issues raised by the public, industry and interest groups during it, were addressed at the time.

So we now need to go back and look at the whole issue again. The food industry is aware that the public would prefer to buy Australian by preference and obviously do not want to highlight that ingredients come from overseas, however the industry is not the bogeyman that it is being made out to be during this whole situation.

If the Code is reviewed and there is an agreement to alter the current CoOL labelling, the food industry will comply, but as with the food safety issue, there may well be an increase in price on products for this to happen.

As a proud supporter of the Australian food industry, it annoys me, and many others, when I hear journalists and politicians opening their mouths about labelling as if it was the whole problem with these two food poisoning outbreaks.

Many industry specialists are out there trying to pour cold water onto the emotions and get people to realise that the problems need to be dealt with scientifically and that there will most likely be a cost involved.

Written by Rachelle Williams, The Green Food Safety Coach.