Posted on 1 Comment

Traceability & the FSAI

Yesterday Dr. Alan O’Reilly of the FSAI told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture that there were three reasons to justify the withdrawal of all pork products from Ireland’ shelves last month. See report in The Irish Times today.

His third reason was the most worrying: “It was not possible to distinguish between contaminated and uncontaminated products in about 98 per cent of the national pork throughput. Reminding the committee that pork was back on the shelves within a week, he said if all pork had been left on the shelves, it would have been impossible to trace contaminated products.”

So much for the traceability that the FSAI themselves have imposed on us.

98% of pork products are NOT traceable?

Our supplier of bacon for curing is only able to give us full traceability if we get pork killed on a Monday. Any other day, and we will only know that it came from one of maybe 5 to 10 herds. We’ll be getting our bacon from the Monday batch from now on. And we will put the name of the grower on the label.

If the FSAI insist on us implementing all the “controls” for “one step forward one step back”, then let’s make it applicable for ALL steps.

Update: Please see Comment below.

Posted on 2 Comments

Bacon Saga Update……

We could get some of our bacon out today, or at least cleared today, but the Pork processors are playing brinkmanship with compensation talks with the Government.

Clearly, the processors feel that as they have lost significant export markets, and its now too late to attempt to get them back for the peak Christmas sales period,  that they are hanging in for the maximum they can get. Their workforces have been laid off or are on protective notice.

Sadly, the small added value processors, like ourselves, won’t see a slice of this compensation package and there are several (maybe many) who rely on pork products for their living who may not come out of this debacle.

Ivan Yates has been pretty critical of the post recall handling, and I think that the Government needs to show who s running the country again – having damaged it initially, they must do something right sometime, surely! Government must get product moving today and order the processors to release information.

And the Vets must be allowed to get the information from the slaughterhouses and processors to clear product NOW.

Tomorrow will be too late for some…..