July2015_More About Food Safety Considerations
– A response to the comments made by Ian Wells in his article on page 1 of the June edition of the Dayboro Grapevine.
It was good to see the ‘Grapevine’ publish on the very important topic of what we eat and to touch on the delicate area of the use of antibiotic drugs in food animal production.
It is no exaggeration to say that the future of mankind depends on how responsibly we manage our arsenal of antimicrobial drugs and it is frightening to know that strains of ‘untouchable’ bacteria that are totally resistant to all antibiotics have already emerged in hospitals in some parts of the world. God help us all when these become more widely established!
Happily, antibiotic use in Australian animal agriculture is tightly controlled. The antibiotics permitted for animal use in this country have been around for many years and are largely phased out of human use. The modern third generation cephalosporin and fluroquinilone antibiotics are tightly protected and are reserved for human treatment only.
The situation is not so jolly overseas. Throughout Asia and the Indian subcontinent there are no controls and all antibiotics are freely available to livestock and aquaculture farmers. Reports from Australians visiting producers in Asia and particularly India, indicate there is massive antibiotic use in intensive animal production. Misuse leads to resistance, a condition when the bacteria are not killed by the antibiotic. These Asian producers will use several antibiotics in the lifetime of one animal. They can spend much of their life being treated with increasing doses as all the antibiotics become ineffective. The result is bacteria on their food that is resistant to antibiotic treatment by a range of antibiotics, many of which are crucial for human medicine. These bacteria find their way into the human food chain and pass their resistance to the bacteria in the human gut. Bacteria have an excellent ability to pass the genes that cause resistance among and between various types of bacteria.
Our nation will be incredibly short sighted and foolish if we export our clean and safe food to Asia for consumption by their wealthy middle class while we import and eat ‘cheap’ contaminated Asian food. After all, the reason the Asian middle class pay a huge premium for Australian food is that they know it is clean and safe and they also know that theirs isn’t. Hard to imagine why Australians go to the supermarket and buy Asian produced food.
The University academics who work in infectious disease of humans are greatly concerned at the misuse of antibiotics overseas and the very real risk that bacteria may be brought into Australia that pass their resistance to disease causing organisms here which may lead to disease in Australia that is difficult or perhaps even impossible to treat.
Fortunately, so far all chicken meat sold in Australia is produced here and so is safe and healthy. But for imported seafood the situation is not so good. Much imported fish, including barramundi, is from Asian fish farms. India has a huge farmed prawn industry as do the Asian countries. Prawns are grown in ponds and require heavy antibiotic use which is bad enough. But the fish are grown in river estuaries. Think about that. The fish are grown at the mouth of a river that extends thousands of kilometres up into Asia. Countless villages are dropping sewage into the river. The runoff from farms using pesticides banned in Australia decades ago finds its way down to the fish farms at the mouth of the rivers. The fish are living in this soup of sewage and contaminated farm runoff. And we buy this because it is a dollar or two cheaper than the fish coming from Australia and New Zealand
At this time we still have a choice. We can still buy Australian or NZ fish and food if we so wish. But many are worried about the sale of our agricultural land and food producing companies to foreign owners. For 60 years the Australian chicken meat industry was owned by Australian family business. Now around 35% is foreign owned. We are selling dairy farms and broadacre grain properties to foreigners. I have heard news reports that Chinese owned grain and dairy farms will not be caught by our tax laws and will not pay tax. My concern, and maybe one of the better informed readers out there may clarify this, is that there will be no export income from some of these vertically integrated foreign owned ventures. We need export income to buy our imports of cars, TVs and the food we no longer keep for ourselves. But if a Chinese company owns the grain farm, brings in 457 visa labour to grow the crop, strips the crop, takes it to the wharf, puts it onto a Chinese owned ship and away it goes to China, do we get any export income? At what point in this process is there a sale? Will Australia get the export income we need to pay for our imports? And if we allow Chinese companies to bring in their own labour, as is speculated to be a part of the brand new shiny Free Trade Agreement, we won’t even get wages. Our farm land might as well be part of mainland China. Please, can someone out there tell me I am wrong?
H.W.
Editorial comment:
SO . . . People smuggling; Terrorism; Illegal entry; Narcotics and tobacco; Objectionable material; and Illegal foreign fishing are important . . . but contaminated foodstuffs – because they will most likely not IMMEDIATELY kill you or send you off to visit the hospital or to your doctor – are OK. !!??
Narcotics are a known illegal substance – ‘consumers’ who indulge in their use have made a decision to ignore the downside of their usage to pursue the ‘high’ they seek. Whereas with the food sold in our stores, consumers are operating under the belief that the Government’s quality and control checks are protecting them!! How does that anomaly sit with you?
