Kedgley Sue: Food Bill — First Reading 
Kedgley Sue: Food Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:665;Page:12622] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 We have heard a lot of gobbledegook today about outcome-focused regulatory regimes reducing business compliance and so forth. I am quite sure that if anyone is listening to Parliament today that person would be none the wiser about what this 342-page Food Bill is about than they were at the outset of the debate. I thought I would begin by reading the Ministry of Health warning or concerns about a Cabinet paper on this bill a copy of which I obtained under the Official Information Act. 
The Ministry of Health said: “We have a concern that the options that were reviewed and the whole paper on this bill focuses very much on improving business certainty and reducing compliance costs with no discussion on any impact of achieving food safety.” It says the Cabinet paper makes no mention of the fundamental purpose of food safety which is to protect human health has no discussion of the extent of food-borne illness in New Zealand and no discussion of whether the proposed changes are good bad or neutral for human health. It says this is a significant gap in the paper which should say either that the changes will improve the protection of human health in which case it should say why whether it will make no changes—and again it should give a justification for this—or whether it will be worse for health in which case it should include a description of what this might mean in a practical sense in terms of the increased risk of food-borne disease and increased reputational risk for New Zealand producers. 
I think it is very important that we heed the warning of the Ministry of Health about this bill because as far as I can deduce the bill introduces a risk management model to food safety by shifting the responsibility for food safety from the Government to the people who produce food. Once the bill is passed it will not be the Government’s responsibility but the food producers’ responsibility to ensure food is safe and they will have to manage all those risks. That sounds fine in theory but if we look at other countries that have done this—and I think particularly of America—we see that they have essentially deregulated food safety from the Government to the food industry and as a result of that there have been some quite spectacular public health disasters. For example America got rid of its Government meat inspectors and said there would be no problem—that the meat companies would provide their own inspectors. Anyone who has watched the move  
Food Inc. 
 will recall the massive E. coli food poisonings and deaths that resulted from inadequate food safety practices in the companies that under this sort of regime were supposed to be guaranteeing that food was safe. 
Of particular concern in this context is the fact that in New Zealand we import such vast amounts of food. Despite being a food-producing nation we import $3.5 billion worth of food each year including 145000 tonnes of fruit 41000 tonnes of vegetables 34000 tonnes of meat and 9300 tonnes of fish. We have no idea where all of this ends up because if we went round the entire supermarket with a magnifying glass we would never find out where the 34000 tonnes of meat imported into New Zealand might have ended up in the supermarket. It is like a modern detective story. Well we will never find out that particular mystery because unlike any other Western country we do not have mandatory country-of-origin labelling. We cannot work out which is which. None of that imported food has to meet the standards that our domestic growers are expected to meet which is galling for them particularly when imported food can be passed off as New Zealand food. 
The other huge concern is that only a tiny fraction of the vast amount of food coming into New Zealand is tested at the border. Europe tests 10 percent of the imported fruit and vegetables and it rejects 10 percent of all consignments of imported fruit and vegetables. What do we test? No one will believe this but it has recently been verified in the Primary Production Committee that we test 0.25 percent. That is how much food we test and even that basically is tested just for high-risk items such as microbial contamination. We are not worried about things like illegal pesticides here. 
Another issue that is of extraordinary concern in the context of this bill is that we do not even have to import food from countries that have food safety regimes in place. We can import food from unregulated countries. I know that people will not believe that this is true but if they do what I have done and trawl through the New Zealand Food Safety Authority website they will come across this statement: “Not all countries have well developed domestic food safety regulatory systems and individual supplier safety practices can vary.” Although the New Zealand Food Safety Authority expects importers where possible to “source food from suppliers that are operating within a regulated environment … If the supplier is not operating within a … regulatory environment an importer should place more emphasis on asking questions about how the food has been produced.” That is code—or gobbledegook—for saying it is perfectly legal in New Zealand to import food from countries that do not have food safety regulations in place—and I might say there is nothing in this bill that seeks to amend that in order to require that we import food only from countries with regulatory systems in place. I ask how transferring the food safety risk to importers that are importing from countries without a regulatory system in place will work. 
The other issue is that the Minister for Food Safety said we have a rapid response to food risks. But let us look at our record. Just recently at the end of last year the state department of health in Texas found high levels of lead in dried plums imported from China. It immediately issued a recall of them all. I checked up and found that yes we import a large amount of dried plums from China. I wondered what the Food Safety Authority might do. Well what it did was to tell importers to check their dried plums to see whether they might be affected. That was the end of the matter; there was no recall and no action. Then 6 months later—let us wait for it—the authority released the results of some testing of a small sample of imported plums which I presume were from China. Can members guess what the authority found? It found illegally high non-compliant levels of lead in the plums but still it did nothing. It was all perfectly safe the authority said 6 months later. That of course was a typical response. It was almost a knee-jerk public relations response from the New Zealand food safety regime to downplay the results and assure consumers that there was absolutely no threat to their health. 
One really worries about the context of our incredibly slack approach to food safety particularly the safety of imported food. Until recently anyone could import food into New Zealand. It was open slather. We did not even need to know who the importers were. Then the authority finally began to require importers to list their name and address with it. The good thing that this bill will do is to finally set up a register of importers so that the Government will know who is importing food into New Zealand and will possibly be able to trace the food back to its source in the event of a food safety concern. But the truth is that despite all of the Minister’s talk about this outcome-focused regulatory regime—that is true; she said it is aimed at providing business certainty and reducing compliance costs—it is doubtful whether it will deliver the same level of food safety outcomes at a lower cost. 
The real purpose of this bill seems to be to deliver the same level of food safety outcomes as previously but at a lower cost. However the truth is that when we consider the context of the slack approach that this Government and previous Governments have taken towards food safety the vast amount of imported produce coming into New Zealand the infinitesimal amount of testing at the border the fact that we can import food from countries that do not even have regulatory regimes in place and the fact that until now we have not even known who has been importing our food I am afraid to say that we are not confident that this bill will really be the great leap forward in terms of food safety in New Zealand that many people have said it will be. The bill is 342 pages long. We will approve its referral to a select committee. I can assure the Government that I will be asking many questions and will seek to figure out whether any of the vast 342 pages of legislation will make a blind bit of difference in terms of improving food safety.