Consumer rights - We all need to be more assertive

It must be very disheartening for the great majority of food producers — from the smallest organic chicken farmer to the industrial-scale beef producer — to watch as efforts to win international consumers’ confidence are undone by the escalating horse-meat scandal.

The tens of thousands of innocent people employed in the sector must worry too that unwelcome, unaffordable ripples will reach their world because of the swindle.

Though first identified in Ireland, the meat fraud has taken on an international and criminal character that will unnerve many consumers already more than sceptical about the integrity of food provenance and labelling. That justified scepticism has been deepened by the almost universal perspective taken on the horse-meat scandal. Nearly all responses put commercial interests, be they meat producers, processors, retailers or catering interests, first. Consumers, if they are mentioned at all, are told that they have been swindled but not to worry about it because a bit of untraceable horse meat never did anyone any harm.

Just as the banking regulators told us that we had nothing to worry about as we careered towards the cliff, food interests are far more concerned about limiting the damage or sanctions imposed on their industry — and its profits — than they are about the rights of those who put themselves at the mercy of an industry happy to call an untraceable horse a well known bullock.

It is utterly unacceptable that one of the most subsidised industries in the history of mankind — about 40% of the EU budget goes on the Common Agricultural Policy — can treat those who buy their products, and support the industry through seemingly never-ending subsidies, in this way.

It is utterly unacceptable too that the interests of the greatest number of people embroiled in this scandal — consumers — are so very feebly represented. That sense of being at least secondary if not all but irrelevant bystanders deepens again when the great furore provoked by meat imports from some South American countries is recalled. During that shouting match we were assured that our meat industry observed standards of integrity unequalled anywhere. How hollow that self-serving drum beating sounds now.

Our Government and the meat sector can take some small consolation in the fact that consumer interests are badly organised and poorly represented right across the western world. This may be a consequence of our enthusiasm for individualism but it has left a vacuum that unscrupulous businesses in, as we have seen to our great cost, food, banking, pensions and so many other areas have not been slow to exploit.

It is one of the obligations of modern governments to stand between individuals and the excesses of the industries that would exploit us. Our economic collapse and now the horse-meat scandal show that we are far too tolerant, far too easily cowed by industries that should be far more rigorously regulated. It is time we had a consumer protection agency with real teeth and the proactive support of Government, something akin to the Criminal Assets Bureau ideally. That we do not suggests that Government has been dissuaded by the very powers they should be monitoring. We have, as it were, put the cart before the horse for far too long.