Irish pork is returning to Irish and European shelves after a terrible week for pig farmers and the reputation of Irish agriculture. However, questions remain over how effectively information was communicated to the public, and who exactly was in control during the crisis, write Paul Cullenand Seán Mac Connell
IT IS CLEAR now that one small shortcut, taken by a minor middle-man in the supply of pig feed was enough to bring the food industry to its knees, with catastrophic consequences for the already tarnished reputation of Ireland Inc. Just a few weeks of madness and negligence, and the price is one we will all be paying for years to come.
In a way, that's how it is with big food and its reliance on intensive forms of production, massive animal numbers and short delivery times; when things go wrong, they go badly wrong. Add to the mix the practice of amalgamating pig products from different sources and the size of Ireland's export industry and you have the further elements for a disaster of international proportions. Not to mention the timing of this crisis, just before Christmas, the busiest time of the year for the pork industry.
Big food is fine so long as you have big regulation to police it. But as the dust settles on a traumatic week and the inquests start, the questions are coming thick and fast. Why wasn't the problem spotted earlier? Did we overreact? Who, if anyone, was running the show? And, ultimately, who pays for crisis?
The contrast with the foot-and-mouth crisis in 2001 couldn't be starker. Back then, Ireland was on the crest of an economic wave; now we feel broken and vulnerable. We took drastic measures to stop foot-and-mouth disease in its tracks and took the cost on the chin; today, the haggling over who will pay for the current crisis has already begun.
We also took great pride in the collective national effort to control foot-and-mouth; in contrast, the public's response to the dioxin crisis in pork has been muted and questioning. Finally, the Government led from the front in 2001 with an experienced minister for agriculture, Joe Walsh, at the helm; this week, his successor, the distinctly inexperienced Brendan Smith, has looked shaky under pressure.
THE EXACT CAUSE of the present misfortune is still under investigation, but indications point to the use of low-grade oil from electricity transformers - possibly up to 30 years old and containing toxic chemicals - in the manufacture of feed. Something went wrong when this oil was used to heat the leftovers of human food - stale bread, out-of-date biscuits, old dough - which are recycled to create food for animals. It appears that tainted fumes containing PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) were absorbed by the feed and entered the food chain.
The problem might never have blown up to the magnitude it did if there were proper regulation and testing of feed materials. This lack of adequate feedstuff monitoring, "the weakest link" in the food chain, amounted to a substantial failure, according to Prof James Heffron, a biochemist at UCC and a prominent critic of the way the crisis was handled during the week. PCBs, he pointed out, are toxic pollutants and many of these compounds are banned under international agreements. Ironically, Ireland, because it never had significant amounts of heavy industry, has lower levels of dioxins and PCBs than our European neighbours, though this may no longer be the perception.
The second failing related to traceability. In response to the BSE crisis, measures were introduced to ensure that cattle in Ireland are fully traceable back to their original factory and farm. Nothing like the same levels of traceability apply to pigs. As Dr Pat Wall of UCD's school of public health has noted, the system is no Rolls-Royce. Once pig meat is processed into sausages, bacon, and so on, traceability to the processor may be possible, but not back to the farm.
This is why, even though only 10 pig farms fed the contaminated supplies, all 400 pig producers got caught up in the affair. As the week progressed, systems improved and some producers were able to get their meat released after they proved to vets it had no connection to the tainted feed. However, the damage had been done.
Of course, traceability costs money, and the pig industry gets nothing like the same level of support that beef farmers enjoy.
The problem might also have been better contained if the presence of dioxins or PCBs in pig feed had been detected earlier. Aside from the general failure to monitor feedstuffs, as mentioned above, there are no dioxin-testing services in the Republic, presumably because of a lack of demand. But then that costs money, too - €1,000 per test.
The Food Safety Authority (FSAI) claims it was the first to identify the problem and notify the EU authorities, but this isn't the whole story.
Back in mid-September, the Netherlands was one of several countries to notice an increase in PCB levels in pork products, but because they were composites they couldn't identify the country of origin. With time they would have done so, and that might have proved even more embarrassing than if we hadn't been first to notify the EU.
The FSAI, having found elevated levels of PCBs in pork during routine tests, was forced to wait for days for the results of further tests from a UK lab that confirmed the presence of dioxins. At that point, the only course of action was to recall the contaminated meat and have it destroyed; it is illegal in the EU to sell meat containing dioxins at the levels found.
BUT WHAT ABOUT pig meat that wasn't contaminated? Faced with the evident shortcomings of the traceability system, the FSAI opted for a blanket recall. In a situation where it wasn't easy or possible to tell good meat from bad, it took the precautionary approach and recalled the lot. The molehill became a mountain.
Talk of an overreaction therefore misses the point. The only reaction possible was to ban contaminated meat, and since it was going to be extremely difficult to separate this quickly from the rest of the industry's output, the authority felt it had no choice but to follow the course adopted. As Pat Wall says, "They were between a rock and a hard place - damned if they did and damned if they didn't".
This week has seen three crises wrapped into one. Pulling vast quantities of pork from the market dealt with the food-safety issue, but it gave birth to separate crises for the industry and for consumer confidence. This explains the divergence of opinion during the week, as it all depended on where you were standing - whether on an over-crowded pig farm, a processing factory that was closed or before the empty shelves in the supermarkets.
Communications are a key aspect of any modern crisis, and here the Irish authorities fell down badly. For a start, there were too many players involved and, it seemed, no clear hierarchy. You could see it in the over-crowded platforms at the press conferences, with speakers jostling to be heard on diverging emphases. As the food writer Georgina Campbell remarked: "There's this awful feeling that there's no one in control."
The FSAI issued the original withdrawal notice last weekend but faded from the scene thereafter. By the end of the week, its name was nowhere to be seen on the notice issued by the Department of Agriculture and Bord Bia as both agencies sought to assure the public there was "no public health issue".
In fact, the scientific advice is that the risk is extremely low, which isn't exactly the same. Dioxins are poisons that stay around in the system for years, which is why they are banned. Given our standards of monitoring and the ongoing investigation, it can't be said with complete certainty that the problem with contaminated feed has been identified in its entirety.
The FSAI's determination to ban all pork, and yet reassure people that the risk was very low, confused the public. Why dump millions of euro of meat when it doesn't pose a health risk, people reasoned. Prof Heffron has suggested it might have been better, given the interim state of the data available to it last weekend, if the authority had pulled its punches by saying that the "indications" were that the risk would be low because the length of exposure was only three months.
Besides, if the risk to health was that low, why had the FSAI insisted on a product recall when only weeks earlier it did not apply the same restriction to mineral water bottlers whose products were found to contain e.coli and other nasty contaminants?
THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, consumers were treated to confusing and seemingly conflicting messages. Pork is not dangerous, but destroy it all the same. Pork is not safe, but you can dump it with the household waste, even if it contains dioxins. There was also the extraordinary statement by Brendan Smith that it was "good news" that samples of beef that tested positive were "only" a few times over the legal limit.
When some beef samples tested positive, the authorities went into reassurance overdrive. The samples, we were told, were "technically non-compliant" with the limits "but not at a level that would pose any public health concern". There are issues here with the communication of complex scientific data to a public largely ignorant and uninterested in the underlying complexities. Messages have to be clear, concise, consistent and repeated at frequent intervals. It helps when they are delivered by a familiar figure enjoying the public's trust. Few of these criteria were satisfied this week.
Over in Britain, the Food Standards Agency's chief food scientist, Andrew Wadge, has tried to tackle the knowledge deficit about science through blogging.
This week, he explained to his readers in simple terms why toxin levels as high as 200 times the safety limits are low risk to consumers. "This is because what have been called 'safety limits' are actually maximum levels defined in EU law that have been set as part of a policy to reduce levels of contaminants in food. So when a legal maximum level is exceeded, it does not inevitably mean there is a risk to people's health."
The Irish authorities also failed to counter the malign depiction of the problem in the tabloid press, particularly in the UK, or on Sky News, which reported at one point during the week that "the toxicity of Irish pigs has now spread to cattle".
This was partly due to Brendan Smith's failure to impose himself on the situation. At press conferences, he deferred to his officials, creating the impression, perhaps unfairly, that he was not in control. Trevor Sargent, Minister of State for Food, didn't speak at Saturday's press conference, though he issued a press release later in the week fretting about the plight of organic pig producers and told radio listeners opaquely that the withdrawal of pork "is as much to do with consumer confidence as it is to do with the logic of the amount of meat affected".
By the end of the week, the crisis was easing and a €180 million deal providing for the compensation of pig processors was hacked out in late-night talks. This should be sufficient to get slaughtering going again and put Irish ham on the Christmas table. However, as Prof Alan Matthews of TCD's economics department said, it is hardly desirable that the industry should be able to offload the costs of a rescue deal on the taxpayer.
But equally, the principle of "polluter pays" has little meaning here, where a small-time culprit may be responsible for damages running into hundreds of millions of euro and there is no hope of recouping this. That means the public will continue to foot the bill for crises, at least until the industry and its regulators get their houses in order.
Total Recall: A timeline of how the crisis unfolded
Nov 19A sample of pork is taken from a bacon factory as part of the routine Department of Agriculture monitoring programme and sent for testing to the National Veterinary Laboratory in Maynooth.
Nov 28The sample results find trace elements of toxins (PCBs).
Nov 29The farm from which the sample came is visited and samples are taken from all feed ingredient there and from pigs.
Dec 1These samples test positive. The contaminated feed is identified and Millstream Recycling in Carlow is visited, as is a second pig farm where animals were slaughtered.
Dec 2Three additional samples taken on November 29th and one feed ingredient sample are confirmed positive for PCBs and samples are sent to the Central Science Laboratory in England, because there is no facility for testing dioxins in Ireland.
Dec 3Millstream Recycling is revisited and 42 samples dating back to feed it has manufactured since September are taken. Restrictions are placed on the plant.
Customers of the plant - seven pig producers with 10 sites and 38 cattle farms - are found to have received the contaminated material. Preliminary results from samples taken from pigs on December 2nd indicate dioxins.
Dec 4Ten pig sites are visited and the pig and cattle farms and feed samples are taken. Late on Thursday evening, the Department issues a press release announcing the farms have been restricted.
Dec 5In response to the statement, the Dutch authorities contact the Department to say that they have found dioxins in rendered pig material but do not know the source. The dioxin, with the same characteristics, has been identified in Belgium and France.
Dec 6The Central Science Laboratory confirms the presence of dioxins in the pork samples from Ireland. The decision is taken immediately to recall all Irish pork products from pigs slaughtered since September 1st.
The EU Rapid Alert System for Feed and Food is activated by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland to advise the EU Commission and all EU member states.
At 7.30pm, the Irish public is informed of the recall of product at a press conference in Government Buildings, presided over by Minister for Health Mary Harney and Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith.
Dec 7Queues form at supermarkets as customers return product.
Dec 8The pig-processing industry announces it will not reopen until it receives a cash injection, and it begins to lay off workers.
Dec 9Minister for Agriculture, Brendan Smith announces that traces of dioxin above the permitted levels have been found in three cattle herds.
Dec 10The European Food Safety Authority clears Irish food as safe in a report to the Commission. Negotiations between Government and pork processors continue. There are reports of Irish food lorries being turned away from Italy.
Dec 11Taoiseach Brian Cowen announces a €180 million package for farmers and processors.