Why did the pig meat tracking system fail so badly?

IN the aftermath of the pigmeat crisis, much has been said about why and how it happened in an effort to understand the meltdown, to prevent another and, as human nature would have it, to find someone to blame.

As a member of the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee I have worked at the European level for full traceability. I have placed great importance on being able to trace meat from animal and herd through processing, export and retail to customer and, in crops, from seed to customer.

Traceability with labelling allows the customer to know basics like where a food comes from and in the case of plant products, if it is free of GMOs, and to be able to find out more exact information if they wish.

This is an essential strategy for health reasons, for consumers to have real choice and to keep the market in food fair for Irish and European farmers. The situation with Brazilian beef and Asian poultry makes this clear.

We have a long way to go in traceability. For example, it is still hard to tell when buying fish if it has been freshly caught in the wild by Irish fishermen or farmed thousands of miles away. We still have a way to go with labelling which fails people with severe and life-threatening allergies.

However, the system of traceability in pigs and pigmeat is highly advanced. It tracks a pig from birth through sales to buyer. If this process, which accumulates considerable cost to the meat, can tell an enquiring customer exactly what farm and factory it came from, how did it fail so spectacularly?

Why was the whole Irish pigmeat industry, even the organic section of it, shut down without distinction? Despite the pride of a European Commission official whom I spoke to during the crisis in the swiftness with which their alert system stopped every Irish consignment and cleared every shelf within a matter of hours, traceability in fact failed.

Traceability means that the affected herds with their distinctive numbers should, and could, have been identified and stopped within hours while safe Irish herds should have remained unaffected.

The fact that the EU and Irish Government reacted by stopping all Irish pigmeat makes a sorry joke of traceability. The fact that the nuclear option of the alert system rather than a targeted approach of traceability was invoked is worrying. Our fishing industry is already well accustomed to a heavy-handed approach. Is this same approach the future for our farmers as well?

Kathy Sinnott MEP

Ballinabearna

Ballinhassig

Co Cork