Food regulator sued for secrecy on food irradiation
13 November 2011Gene Ethics and the Safe Food Institute vs Food Standards Australia NZ (FSANZ) will be heard before Justice Kenny in the Federal Magistrates Court in Melbourne at 10.15am today. The applicants claim FSANZ failed to comply with the law that requires it to give complete and clear public notice.
"We say FSANZ broke the law by inserting a general review of Irradiated Food Standard 1.5.3, without public notice, into a Queensland Government application only to irradiate persimmons (proposal A1038)," says Gene Ethics Director Bob Phelps.
"In our view, FSANZ should at the very least have mentioned the general review in the title of the amended application and in related documents and reports, but it didn't.
"Ideally, FSANZ would have separately published its proposed general review of the food irradiation standard and told the public of their right to comment.
"FSANZ refused our request for both applications to be re-advertised and re-assessed separately so we had no option but to seek a remedy through the courts.
"This is a public interest case as the general review of Food Irradiation law would weaken irradiated food labelling and record-keeping requirements.
"We consider this an important case as FSANZ admits it had also buried its own general revisions to Food Standard 1.5.2 on genetically manipulated foods within another specific application. We still do not know the extent of those changes or how they were assessed," Mr Phelps says.
FSANZ CEO Steve McCutcheon noted Gene Ethics' concerns that: "the title of the Application, 'Irradiation of Persimmons' might be misleading. FSANZ will consider whether it is appropriate or practical to change procedures for identifying applications in order to provide additional information about an application that has an extended purpose."
FSANZ Final Approval document also said: "... the NZ Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry suggested that for transparency, the amendments should be communicated in the title of the consultation to indicate to stakeholders the additional reforms proposed to the Standard in Application A1038." P20. "We wholeheartedly agree."
And belatedly the Approval says: "FSANZ has amended the description of the Application in the Work Plan and for any future references to the description/purpose of this Application." P21 "We seek a judgement from the court that requires FSANZ to give full and fair public notice of all future applications," Mr Phelps says.
Safe Food Institute Director, Scott Kinnear says, "From our perspective, this does not go far enough and we challenge FSANZ to reprocess the applications separately. Some scientific evidence suggests that irradiated food may be harmful.
"Meticulous record-keeping and honest labels are essential to ensuring any public health impacts are detected.
"Yet we missed out on making a submission because the general review of Standard 1.5.3 was hidden behind persimmons.
"We did not know because FSANZ failed to tell us of proposed general changes to Standard 1.5.3 in its media release, notice to subscribers, Administrative and Risk Assessment Reports, FSANZ News and Notification Circulars and in the Fact Sheet. We think FSANZ omissions amounted to misleading and deceptive conduct.
"It will be a big win for the public interest if the court decides that FSANZ must always give separate, full and clear notice of future applications for general amendments to the Food Standard," Mr Kinnear concludes.
A1038 docs at:
http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/foodstandards/applications/applicationa1038irra4655.cfm