New Zealand’s food supply is the proverbial box of chocolates. Supermarkets offer a buffet of food choices – but when even New Zealand apples don't necessarily come from New Zealand, do you really know where your next meal is coming from?
A fortnight ago, the folic acid furore splattered all over the radar like fresh Ministerial road kill. Science ceased to matter; Professor Skeaff’s voice drifted faintly and briefly up from the hastily-erected cairn to national sovereignty and personal choice, while we read him those time-honoured “nanny state” rites, with a fillip of “mass medication”.
Such a fantod over what was, essentially, a pimple on Nanny’s posterior. Most days we seem neither to know nor care that, every time we make a supermarket purchase, we’ve ceded control of our food supply. We dawdle the aisles, and pretend to choose. Informed choice requires – you guessed it – information, which we don’t get, because the government says we don’t need it; they know best.
Food comes to New Zealand from all over the world, around $2.8 billion worth in 2008, comprising everything we grow so well ourselves, or could – meat, seafood, dairy and eggs, cereals, fruit and nuts, vegetables, and “productions” of them. There are green beans and sweetcorn from Zimbabwe, honey from the Pitcairn Islands, Vietnamese catfish, Armenian “fruit juice”. We import very little fresh produce from China – principally garlic (which should be “fresh” in inverted commas, because Chinese garlic has been chemically treated to stop it behaving like, well, garlic). Nonetheless, the statistics show Chinese imports in every one of the primary produce food categories totalling tens of millions of dollars.
Astonishingly, nobody knows with any certainty what proportion of our food is imported. Figures prepared for the New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA) in 2004, based on 1998 data, put it at 19% by dollar value “and that proportion is increasing”. When I phoned the NZFSA, they thought it still would be about 20%, although they hadn’t updated the figures, because it “doesn’t really change”. But my own rough, conservative guess (copying the 2004 methodology, using information from Statistics New Zealand about household food expenditure, and adjusting for retail margins) puts it at around one-third in 2007. (I couldn’t verify another recent estimate, of “about half”.)
I wanted to find out because, if we don’t import much food, then we do know where most of it comes from. New Zealand. End of story. But whether it’s 20% or 50% or something in between, the vagueness itself kind of proves my point: food is food, says the government, and who cares who grew or made it. (Unless we – New Zealand – did, and people overseas might buy it, in which case ours is by far the best.)
Country of origin labelling is not required in New Zealand, although it may of course be done voluntarily to suit marketing purposes. Misleading and deceptive conduct is regulated by the Commerce Commission. There is no published legal standard for the use of language on labels, other than what the Commerce Commission deems acceptable from time to time.
Een if food manufacturers and distributors choose to label food, “made in New Zealand” (or any other country) it does not mean the ingredients were grown in New Zealand (or the other country). “Product of New Zealand” however does. I suspect that's a distinction that would escape most shoppers.
“Made in New Zealand” means that what may be either a domestic or imported food has been physically altered or processed in New Zealand. If sweetcorn was imported from Zimbabwe and frozen or creamed in New Zealand, it would, strictly speaking, be “made in New Zealand”. The Commerce Commission has issued warnings to one company about bacon made from imported pork; the labels now say “made in the Wairarapa from local and imported ingredients”. Branding is no guide: Zespri kiwifruit and ENZA apple labels are quality marks but they don’t guarantee the country of origin.
The NZFSA’s express function is to decide on our behalf what is “safe and suitable food”. The official line – which I accept – is that there is no imported food safety issue; quality isn’t variable depending on country of origin. The high point of this argument, though, is that there’s no evidence of a problem. Part of the reason we don’t have any evidence is because we don’t go looking for it.
There is a protocol for inspecting and sampling a small number of “prescribed foods” that have been identified as high risk. An external review found that New Zealand practice was similar to best practice in comparable countries, and there were no major or urgent safety risks. But it also acknowledged that, for a variety of reasons, there is minimal scrutiny of chemical hazards in the form of residues or contaminants, and no testing of whether unapproved genetically modified ingredients might be present.
Before I’m accused of wowserism, I’ve no wish to come home to yesteryear’s dinner. Exposing myself to charges of hypocrisy, my cupboard’s full of imported food. But I know where it came from, who made it, what’s in it, and why I‘m buying it: because it’s delicious and, often, better than ours.
The recently launched country of origin labelling (CoOL) campaign echoes Sue Kedgley’s similar petition for the mandatory labelling of “single component” foods rejected by the last Parliament.
Jim Anderton and the dairy and meat lobbies called it “blatant protectionism”. Sure, telling people where food comes from might invite them to make choices based on misinformation and prejudice, and end up acting as a trade barrier, but Anderton et al’s response had all the hallmarks of a primarily political objection: we don’t want CoOL at home, because that would undermine our trade-based complaints when other countries do it.
We’re losing that argument, as we should, because it’s nonsense. All of our key export markets, and many from whom we import, have mandatory CoOL on at least some products. In Australia and the United States, the CoOL requirements are far more extensive than anything proposed in New Zealand to date. Australia’s CoOL standard is promulgated under the now infamous joint food agreement (note to Kate Wilkinson: we passed on that one), the purpose of which is to, er, facilitate trade.
A CoOL requirement has as much potential advantage as disadvantage for an exporting country and its products. I buy French chocolate and Italian cheese because they are so good at what they do. New Zealand should embrace that opportunity, not consider it a threat. While we’re throwing around glib words like “protectionism”, let me toss in a few of my own, like “cultural cringe” and “egalitarian”. We should be proud to brand our food from this country, and quick to demand that others do the same, because that supports the free market.
The alternative looks more like – what was that snappy phrase again, Mr Key? – “communism by stealth”, with us all lining up for the standard issue bread. Even domestically, up until last week – when the Pork Industry Board announced that labelling practices will change to differentiate free range from crate-farming – New Zealand Pork has strenuously defended the lowest common denominator. It’s the Kiwi way.
The Food and Grocery Council says to track and trace food would be too hard. Moore Wilson’s Fresh Market in Wellington is a big busy place these days, but it delights in telling me not only primary products’ country of origin but, very often, the farmer or grower. Monitoring the supply chain of “single component” foods shouldn’t be that hard; if it is, perhaps we need to have a different conversation about what’s wrong with the supply chain.
As for multi-ingredient processed food – this is about supporting choice. Anyone who delegates their cooking to Uncle Toby and Mr Patak I reckon has waived that right. But between the single and multi-component extremes, there are half a dozen different labelling policy options, whose relative costs and benefits could be explored.
Mandatory CoOL does have dubious advantages. If labelling single component foods is not that difficult, it’s certainly not much use, because they’re not a big part of most people’s shopping basket. And, just as it isn’t the state’s job to make me eat folic acid, nor, arguably, is it a proper government function to facilitate my choice. The government should keep its hands off food, and allow the market to gravitate towards voluntarily labelled products – or not, as the case may be, if the market doesn’t care.
The UK Conservatives don’t see it that way though; they’ve launched an “honest food” campaign. On the labels they’ve identified as the most heinous examples, there’s already far more information available to anyone who looks, than can be found on a package in New Zealand.