Egg scare shows flaws in food alert system: watchdog

Ministers quizzed over tainted eggs

BERLIN, Aug 26, (AFP): Recalls of unsafe food products often reach consumers too late or not at all, the campaign group Foodwatch said Thursday, calling for tighter oversight after a Europewide scare erupted over insecticide-tainted eggs.

“The flawed communication about the fipronil-contaminated eggs is not an isolated case,” the German branch of Foodwatch said in a report.

“Consumers routinely don’t know about important food warnings. Often the companies and authorities decide on recalls too late, or sometimes not at all.”

Foodwatch said the failings in the food alert system “were once again on display with the lack of information from authorities in the recent scandal over the fipronilcontaminated eggs.”

Millions of eggs have been pulled from supermarket shelves and destroyed. The scare has spread to 18 European countries and even reached Hong Kong.

Officials in Germany, as in several other countries, have come under fire for not going public early enough with their concerns.

In its report, “Calling for a recall”, Foodwatch said a study of 92 recalls in Germany over a year showed that just 53 percent were flagged on time on a governmentrun food safety website (lebensmittelwarnung.de).

In one case, a warning over possible listeria-tainted mushrooms only went online three days after the authorities were notified. It had come in over the New Year’s break, when no-one was working, Foodwatch said.

Regulations

Foodwatch said current food safety regulations were too vague and left “too much room for interpretation” as to when a recall is needed.

It urged the government to take a more active role, as producers had a clear “conflict of interest” when it came to taking unsafe products off the market.

It also said more efforts had to be made to tell consumers about recalls, using all possible means including social media, press releases and signs in supermarkets.

“Food producers almost never use all the communication tools available to warn about unsafe products,” Foodwatch said.

In the case of the eggs scare, Belgium became the first country to officially notify the EU’s food safety alert system on July 20, followed by the Netherlands and Germany.

But the news did not go public until Aug 1.

Meanwhile, Dutch MPs on Thursday grilled two ministers over the tainted-egg scandal that has swept Europe as the country sought to mend its poultry industry’s battered reputation.

Lawmakers fired questions at Health Minister Edith Schippers and deputy economy minister Martijn van Dam at a special fivehour session of parliament’s economics commission.

Many lawmakers blamed the country’s Food and Goods Authority watchdog (NVWA) for failing to prevent the problem from developing into a scandal that now extends across Europe, reaching as far as Hong Kong.

Action should have been taken back in November 2016, when the NVWA received its first tip-off that a banned insecticide, fipronil, was being used to rid chicken farms of red lice, they said.

“If concrete action had been taken at that point, the whole situation could have been prevented,” said Animal Party (PvvD) representative Esther Ouwehand.

“Within a few weeks (of the tip-off), it could have been determined that it (fipronil) was being used on a wide scale,” added Rik Grashoff of the eco-friendly Green-Left party. “Surely it’s not rocket science.”

Schippers and van Dam defended the NVWA’s actions and denied that the scandal had happened because of years of budget cuts.

“The NVWA is working fullblast on a plan,” to improve controls and communication in future, Van Dam said.

Dutch business was at the epicentre of a food scandal in 2013 when beef tainted with horsemeat was sold across Europe.

Investigated

“It’s too easy to make judgements before we’ve properly investigated the matter,” Van Dam said.

The Dutch government announced Wednesday the egg scandal had cost local poultry farmers at least 33 million euros ($39 million).

“It was a painful and bitter lesson,” said Van Dam, who admitted that some farmers “are not going to make it.”

Van Dam said however officials were hard at work trying to fix the Dutch poultry industry’s image, particularly in its main export market Germany, which gets 71 percent of its eggs from the Dutch market, according to the central statistics office.