A joint Horticulture New Zealand and Consumer survey revealed 71% of consumers want their produce to have mandatory Country of Origin Labelling (CoOL) for fruit and vegetables, closing aligning with the 70% preferring to buy NZ-grown produce.
HortNZ chief executive Mike Chapman said the movement to CoOL was gaining momentum, helped by the serendipitous timing of a Green Party bill due to go to a select committee later this month or in April.
“The Consumers’ Right to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill happened to come up before Christmas and it was the same time we were already looking to do the survey.
“As it happens the results support what this bill is intending to do.”
Chapman said NZ was a rarity in the world with its voluntary food source labelling.
NZ shares its non-CoOL status with nine developing or third world countries including Vietnam, Philippines, Honduras, Estonia and Colombia.
“All our major trading partners and many other countries already have CoOL and the survey also showed that the voluntary approach is simply not working.
“The irony is that you have to have a label of origin on your shoes and shirts but you don’t eat them and they are not going to affect your health the way food does.”
Survey results on the use of the voluntary code included a supermarket study of frozen vegetable and fruit products.
There were 81 packets examined and 17 had only “vague” statements of product origin, including “made from local/imported ingredients” or “packed in NZ from imported ingredients”.
Consumer chief executive Sue Chetwin hoped the Government would re-examine CoOL, given it was out of step with the rest of the developed world.
“Australia is much further down the track than us but if we can even get a basic CoOL labelling in place, great.”
Chapman said it was also ironic, given NZ shared almost all other food safety standards with Australia under the Food Standards Australia-NZ bi-national agency.
“And when you look at the requirements placed on our produce growers when exporting to Australia, they have to meet quite complex requirements in determining the product’s country of origin. It seems that if we were going to adopt any standards, then why not adopt the Australian standards?”
NZ had the opportunity to comply with Australia’s CoOL standards in 2005 but instead decided to adopt a voluntary process.
At the time the Government maintained opting in would be an impediment to trade and believed a voluntary system backed by the Fair Trading Act would suffice.
“But we believe the push for change is coming and it is up to the Government to move on it,” Chapman said.
The HortNZ-Consumer survey was reinforced by a Tomatoes NZ survey finding 85% of consumers wanted clear labelling to help them identify between NZ tomatoes and irradiated Australian imports.
Food Safety Australia-NZ (FSANZ) required compulsory labelling of all irradiated produce coming into NZ but even that was up for review.
Irradiation of produce was not permitted in NZ.
Tomatoes NZ chairman Alisdair MacLeod said despite standards already tending to favour a protectionist Australian view, producers here were not seeking anything Australia and other trading partners did not already have in their regulations.
“And if the requirement to label food as irradiated is removed, then people will not know where it’s from nor if it has been irradiated,” he said.
But there was little indication the Government was interested in considering CoOL at this stage.
“I have never really understood what the Government’s opposition is to something all our trading partners already have.”
An MPI spokesman said the department was not reviewing the voluntary CoOL requirement. It was a consumer preference issue, not a food safety issue.
And the voluntary agreement was working well, with 80% of fresh produce using CoOL labelling, in response to consumer demand.
Australia’s recent upgrading of its CoOL labelling was a consumer preference issue not a food safety one and was no longer part of the shared food standards regime.
“New Zealand has resisted the adoption of mandatory CoOL regimes by other countries because of the risk that they could have a negative impact on NZ exports,” he said.
