Meat exporters to try to control costs

The meat industry hopes to save millions of dollars from a cost review of the hygiene requirements in international trade deals reports Stuff. The joint Meat Industry Association-Food Safety Authority review started a few months ago and has already identified possible multimillion-dollar savings in processing procedures.However, there is a snag. Almost all the procedures are enshrined in trade arrangements and changing them will mean renegotiations with importing countries. Authority chief executive Andrew McKenzie said an example was the practice of splitting a beef carcass in two before removing the meat. It would be just as easy to do the job on a whole carcass and save time and effort. However, to change it meant getting other countries that had written it into their rules to agree. An earlier example of a simple change that did not need international agreement was to use cold water to chill lamb. This stopped the loss of 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent of the meat's weight from water loss during chilling, saving the industry $70 million a year. Dropping an unnecessary inspection of sheep heads resulted in another big saving "“ $3m for the authority and $10m to $12m for the processors. The cost to the industry of the authority enforcing hygiene regulations and of meat inspections by AsureQuality was more than $50m. A lot of the requirements were based on hygiene laws set by other countries. In the United States, for example, many regulations were based on a law dating from 1906. "What we hope to do is look at exactly where we can put the effort in, feed it into our market access negotiation strategies and start working these things through." Meat Industry Association chief executive Tim Ritchie said "At the same time, we have to make sure we don't undermine the assurances of quality we give; don't cut corners and end up paying for it," he said.