Too little, too late on food chain

Our food processors — and food security — need protecting. It’s time our leaders stopped paying lip service to repeated calls for action, argues The Weekly Times.

High risk: Food processors must be protected. Picture: File

IT’S clear our political leaders have been paying lip service to repeated industry calls for agriculture and food processors to be deemed essential services in the wake of coronavirus hitting the nation’s shores in January.

The Weekly Times asked the agriculture ministers in mid-March what action they were taking to resource and protect the nation’s food supply chain, to which they responded with assurances that, of course, our food manufacturing was essential.

But there was no sign of leadership from Victorian Agriculture Minister Jaclyn Symes on ensuring bodies such as PrimeSafe developed and enforced the rigorous protocols needed to keep meat workers in teams isolated from each other and to prioritise testing and screening.

We even had the Australian Meat Industry Council and the Australian Dairy Products Federation calling for such protocols, to ensure any coronavirus outbreak could be detected and cleaned up within hours, not days.

But it took Ms Symes until April 23 to finally announce that she had formed an Agriculture Industry Reference Group to create a unified strategy in response to the crisis.

Yet it was all too late for one of Victoria’s major abattoirs — Cedar Meats, which has now been locked down for a fortnight.

As Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton highlighted this week, COVID-19 outbreaks in US has already shown it can rapidly spread through meat works.

So isn’t it time for Minister Symes and her Federal counterpart David Littleproud, to show some leadership and ensure our food processors and security are protected.