Horsemeat Fraud Could Be Just “First Out of the Gate”

In a presentation at a food security event of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), Liz Moran, president of the Association of Public Analysts (APA), said that a shift toward light-touch regulation of the food industry could result in other fraudulent food practices going undiscovered. Moran’s words should serve as a warning for the U.S. industry as well.

At the event, triggered by the horse meat scandal, Moran said that lack of funding for official control laboratories has broken the system for enforcing food safety and standards in the UK. “The gap between the checks that the public think take place on their food, and the reality, is huge,” she said, adding, “There has been a policy shift toward light-touch regulation of the food industry in the UK. The reason given for this has been to reduce the burdens on business to help kick-start the economy, but the reality is it has partly been a cost-saving exercise. The result is that self-policing in the food industry has allowed the industry and the enforcers to become complacent, and assumptions to be made that everyone was playing by the rules.”

Additionally, she said, the public has come to expect cheap food, which puts food manufacturers under pressure to cut production costs. “It was inevitable that this would lead to cutting corners, and in the case of the horsemeat scandal it has led to criminal activity.” Moran called for the government to reduce the current policy of risk-based sampling and recognize that the UK must play its part in detecting food fraud early on.

“A European network for food fraud might have given notice of the horsemeat problem much earlier on,” she said. “Going forward, an initiative like this would be something positive to come out of this potentially damaging incident.”