Foods "relatively ordinary " rule breaker

For as long as NZ has been selling meat to Europe, exporters have been battling the Eurocrats, with their often ridiculous rules purporting to ensure food safety.

 What made it more galling, was that often their own domestic processing and meat handling systems fell way short, of the standards they set.

Putting NZ's case over the years was Dr Andrew McKenzie, whose dogged success in bringing common sense to the rules, has had him called, "the father of modern meat inspection".

 His retirement leaves behind a legacy of many millions of dollars saved by farmers in the meat industry, and a freer international food trade.

Andrew McKenzie could justly claim the title of the father of modern meat inspection conferred on him by a speaker at a European conference recently reportsBusiness Day. The retiring chief executive of the Food Safety Authority was a lowly government official in the mid-80s when he had the temerity to challenge the European-imposed rules governing meat inspection.

He went to the European Union headquarters and argued that many of the rules didn't make sense in the NZ context. "They asked me to list them. Three days later I came back with 200 examples. The result was an "equivalency" agreement between Europe and NZ.

"That agrees there's a bunch of basic things you need to do to make a difference to public and animal health, but there's also others that are just good meat manufacturing and hygiene practice and they can vary," he says."Since then our relationship has gone along really well."

The agreement cleared the way for trade and was used as a template by the United States and Canada. Crucial to the ongoing success of the agreement, and those that followed, has been New Zealand's reputation for integrity and honesty in international trade.