Browning Steffan: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBrowning Steffan: General Debate[Sitting date: 17 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9446. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STEFFAN BROWNING (Green): The Ministry for Primary Industries was informed last October that milk was contaminated with dicyandiamide. What did it do with that information? Did it inform all other milk processors immediately? No it did not—no it did not. Fonterra and the Ministry for Primary Industries sat on it. They sat on it right through for another 3 months into 2013 before they let the community know before they let their trading partners know and before they let the other processors which were just as likely to be affected by contamination of milk by dicyandiamide know. So what was this? This was basically a major cover-up a damage controloperation by part of the industry but not by all of those in the industry. They could not even participate as they were not told.The Official Information Act papers that the Green Party has obtained show that the team working on this issue was almost singularly focused on not letting the story get out. What was its concern? Well it had quotes like that it was agreed that “until the meeting on 21 [January with Fonterra] the issue will stay between the two parties without involving other organisations.” and that “MPI need to be careful of the time frame between being made aware of the issue and communicating this to the public …”. This is a public that could buy something that may or may not have been contaminated. There are obviously a range of views on the risks to that public. The ministry had contingencies for when the balloon went up. It had words like the run-up to “D-Day” and said: “Ideally we would like no media coverage.”Our regulators should be concerned with food safety producing high-quality products and protecting our international reputation which needs to be maintained. Clearly that was part of that but was that the right way to go about it? It certainly was not. Not keeping food contamination a secret being open and letting people know what was going on straight away would have been a good idea. I am sure there have been lessons learnt but it was 3 months later before they made it public. Not only that Fonterra has also got a lot to answer for because it had the results from August 2012. The ministry decided to tell the world it was September but it actually had them earlier. The results were coming through on 24 August 27 August—it did know that back then.But there was another issue in behind there. In the meantime while this was all happening the Fonterra share float happened. Of course while that happened—and a number of people in here will have been at Darfield on 30 November opening the big new factory when the share float effectively happened—it went up by 20 percent in value in the first few minutes. But all that time it was sitting on the fact that it had something that it knew would affect markets and would affect the reaction of people to that share float. Exporters reported very very quickly that sales fell through the floor after the news broke.Is there an alternative? Of course there is an alternative. We do not need to be using theoretical silver bullets that will bite us in the butt because they are a short-lived unsustainable solution to an unsustainable farming system. There are good solutions. The solutions are in using sustainable farming systems—genuinely sustainable farming systems—that tick all the boxes. They ensure farm profitability like organics can do and does when it is given the opportunity in this country and is not suppressed by the Government or by the principal people in the sector. Clean safe food is possible in this country and as I say it is profitable as well. The demand for organics for example has just gone up by 28 percent in 2012—30 percent up in prices as well.I note that the ministry when it has ever looked for dicyandiamide—even when it tested for itself further back in 2010—did not even do it properly. It looked when there was a narrow window when it would not be found and it was in areas where it would not be found. We can do better and organics is part of it.