UK risks ‘disastrous’ food scandal due to lax post-Brexit border controls – NFU chief

theguardian.com:

Britain is in danger of a “disastrous” food scandal, owing to lax post-Brexit border controls on agricultural imports, the leader of the UK’s biggest farming organisation has warned.

Minette Batters, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, accused ministers of a “dereliction of duty” in failing to ensure food and other agricultural imports were safe. She warned that the government had failed to learn the lessons of the horsemeat scandal of 2013.

“We are seeing little to no checks on imports that are coming in from the EU,” she told the Guardian. “We have the massive risk of African swine fever in Europe, and to not be investing in our defences for keeping our biosecurity and animal and plant health safe, I think is just a dereliction of duty.”

After the horsemeat scandal, in which products such as burgers and lasagne purporting to contain 100% beef were found to show traces of horsemeat, stricter controls were put in place on many food systems.

But Batters said those controls were being eroded, with “so little checks” on imports, and pointed to recent findings that many lorries entering the UK contained fraudulent meat. “If there was a food scare from Europe, it would be very difficult to trace it right now,” she warned.

“Many in [food] retail, processing and manufacturing would say that on the back of horsegate we developed the safest most secure food supply chain in the world. There was massive investment in safety and security and short supply chains,” she told the Guardian.

“I think there’s a real risk 10 years on that we forget those lessons of the past, and there’s nothing that will bring this country to a standstill quicker than a food scare,” she said. “That would be disastrous, and we want to do everything