Germans Split on Measures to Combat Food Scares
September 13, 2006
In Frankfurt last weekend, veterinary authorities located 25 tons of rotten beef and pork in a cold storage warehouse. The city's health department said the meat stank and had only been good through July 2005.
Over the past few months, authorities have uncovered dozens of tons of rancid meat, mainly from retailers in Bavaria. A German wholesaler accused of having sold rotten meat to shops across Germany and in eight other European countries even committed suicide earlier this month.
Munich police inspector Josef Wilfling said authorities suspect a web of dubious meat sales to fast food stands in Germany. The meat has been thawed, processed and refrozen. Wilfling spoke of a "döner kebab mafia," which supplied some of Germany's ever-present kebab stands with thick skewers of rotten meat.
"Food controls in Germany don't work," said Ulrich Kelber, deputy head of the Social Democrat (SPD) faction in parliament. "That is a fact."
According to Kelber, part of the problem lies in Germany's federal structure. Food controls are presently not the prerogative of the federal government, but rather the task of Germany's 16 states. The individual state ministries for consumer protection develop programs for investigating food chains. Local food control and veterinary authorities in cities and districts in turn then perform the inspections.
"The incidents in Bavaria give an impression of a banana republic," Kelber wrote in his online Weblog. "The inspectors didn't discover the old meat during their controls, because it was stored in the upper racks." In one case, 30 tons of rancid meat was only found after a mushroom collector happened upon a suitcase with incriminating documents about the meat discarded in the woods. He alarmed the authorities, who subsequently took a closer look at the warehouse."
Sorting out the bad apples in the barrel
Help may already be on the way. The German parliament's lower house Bundestag approved a new consumer information law this summer. The upper house Bundesrat is expected to pass it next week on September 22.
The new law intends to make it easier to make public the bad apples in the food industry. This could function as a control mechanism. Companies with spotty records could suffer significant losses in sales if their names are connected with food scandals.
But the opposition Green Party says the law doesn't go far enough.
"The law has so many exceptions and loopholes, it's as holey as Swiss cheese," said Bärbel Höhn, the Greens deputy faction leader in parliament.
"Naming and shaming" can put pressure on producers
Consumer rights groups are also concerned about the law's information regulations.
"If authorities refuse to disclose information with reference to trade and company secrets, then the law is nothing more than a toothless tiger," said Edda Müller, head of the Federation of German Consumer Organizations.
Transparency would give consumers more power to "name and shame." In Denmark, for example, a smiley system publishes results from food inspections. Smileys look at consumers from restaurant and shop windows, from the walls behind counters or from the refrigerated glass cases where food products are on display.
The Smiley scheme, which was launched in 2001, has proven to be effective in raising food safety, according to the Danish Food Administration.
Existing laws are adequate if properly applied
But opinions are divided about whether new legal machinery is required to combat food scares.
The German Federation of Food Law and Food Science BLL in Bonn, which represents the food sector throughout the entire production chain "from farm to fork," said new laws are not the answer.
"The protective measures of existing food laws are sufficient; they just have to be effectively controlled and implemented," said BLL's director Matthias Horst.
According to Horst, an effective organization of official food controls, professional expertise and the threat of stringent penalization for those who manipulate the food chain would weed out potential criminals.
"The pressure of prosecution has to significantly raise the risk of being caught in criminal schemes," Horst said. In addition, exhausting existing penalties of up to five years in prison was much more deterring than tightening the threat of punishment.
BLL called on the government to implement uniform regulations. The German Agriculture and Consumer Minister Horst Seehofer said the government would exert more pressure on controls.
"We will reform the entire food monitoring system so that we tackle this problem at the root and make it more unlikely that criminal wheeler-dealers will get away without getting caught," Seehofer said.
Are consumers paying the price for their stinginess?
In addition to questions about lax controls and criminal activities, the rotten meat scandal has also raised concerns about another related problem -- consumers in Germany being increasingly lured by dirt-cheap prices.
There's little doubt that price wars in the German retail market have affected food just as much as any other sector. Discount supermarkets have gained the upper hand; consumers appear to want more for less.
The federal government now wants to put an end to price dumping for certain products. The Federal Economics Ministry has confirmed respective reports that it is working on a law forbidding the sale of meat, bread, produce and other foodstuffs below cost.
But the German Retailers Association HDE said state-controlled prices are not the answer to the meat problem.
"This is simply a red herring," said HDE's head Hubertus Pellengahr. "Discount and low quality are two completely different things." The real problem was "sloppy state controls," he said.