The investigation of meat-cutting plants in Britain has so far revealed little. The industry-wide probe has brought about the closure of one major company as well as a voluntary withdrawal of a limited amount of product in two other cases. In each of the two latter withdrawals, it was at the companies' initiation as opposed to any action by the Food Standards Agency (FSA).

Few revelations

For what is an industry-wide investigation, there have been remarkably few revelations over the past two weeks. During this time, allegations were made by a whistle-blower on UK television of fraudulent labelling being endemic in the meat industry.

As explained previously in the Irish Farmers Journal, if an unscrupulous company chose to fraudulently re-label product, it could be done and money could be earned. However, to achieve this, a compliant workforce is required and in the era of modern mobile communication, any unscrupulous business contemplating this is taking a huge risk of being exposed by an employee.

In any case, the investigation is ongoing and it is somewhat reassuring that findings of malpractice haven’t been regularly reported. Of course, nobody will want fraudsters caught and dealt with more than the legitimate players in the meat-processing industry, who have had to accommodate the inconvenience of an in-depth investigation.

Anti-meat lobby

A further beneficiary of the negative headlines around the meat industry is the vocal anti-meat lobby. They will see any negative reporting as an opportunity to castigate the entire sector.

Statistics can be used to paint the category in a bad light. Newspaper reports in the UK have highlighted how more than half of all audited plants have had at least one “major” audit breach in the last three years. It could be read from such a statement that non-compliance is endemic.

Misleading statistics

However, in response, the FSA, which publishes the results of all its audits online in complete transparency, has highlighted that each audit assesses almost 50 different hygiene criteria and a single issue can result in multiple major and minor non-compliances being recorded. Only 2% of plants were found to have more than two major non-compliances and the majority had none at all.

In other words, the issues were found to be rare and where they did occur, corrective action was taken and the audit frequency increased where necessary. The recent decision by the FSA to stop production where it was not satisfied with the standards demonstrates that it has teeth when required. That it takes such action so rarely suggests an industry largely in compliance.