'Devastating': Fruit growers fear being collateral damage in health outbreaks
Fruit growers have called for clearer and better co-ordinated public warnings about isolated heath risks from food safety authorities to avoid sparking "hysteria" that can ravage entire industries.
Strawberry growers nationwide are grappling with the fallout of the needle contamination crisis, which has inflicted millions of dollars of damage on their businesses.
Strawberries growers are grappling with how to deal with the crisis.
Photo: SuppliedThere have been only a small number of confirmed tampering incidents since a Queensland man ate a strawberry with a needle inside on September 9, triggering a national recall of six brands. But dozens more reports have been made to police that are thought to be the work of copycats or pranksters.
Rockmelon growers went through a similar ordeal in February when six people died in a listeria outbreak linked to melons grown at a single farm near Griffith in NSW.
Dianne Fullelove, industry development manager for the Australian Melon Association, said the public needed to be informed about health and safety risks in a way that did not cause needless alarm or scare consumers off unrelated producers' products.
"The rockmelon industry has not recovered," she said. "We’ve had growers go out of the industry - it’s devastating really.
"We have to tell people [when there is a health risk] but we have to make sure that their understanding of the problem is in perspective."
Mrs Fullelove said authorities identified the source of the listeria outbreak early on but did not release the name of the grower publicly until almost three weeks after the first public warning about the outbreak.
All producers in the region were tarred with the same brush during that period, and authorities could have contained the damage and quelled sensationalised media reports by releasing more information earlier.
"The grower was identified very early, his fruit disappeared from the supply chain within a day. But that just doesn’t cut through," she said.
Jennifer Rowling, development officer for the Queensland strawberry industry, has said the strawberry-tampering issue was mishandled by some spokespeople, which, along with "sometimes hysterical media", inflicted millions of dollars of damage on the industry.
"We call on other state agencies to commit to supporting the industry and closely examine their own crisis communication processes," she said.
With the first strawberries from the coming Victorian harvest expected to be on retail shelves within four weeks, the industry there is hoping the tampering scare will be over by then.
In the meantime, major growers are installing metal detectors to check punnets of fruit before they leaves their sheds, to preserve the integrity of their crop.
Angela Atkinson, industry development officer with the Victorian Strawberry Industry Development Committee, said while Victorian growers were concerned about the fruit safety scare, they were confident all the processes were in place to ensure strawberries were safe when they left their farms.
Dr Atkinson said the incident showed there was a need for good co-ordination between the states to ensure accurate and clear information was released to the public.
“All these fresh fruit industries all have very strict fresh food safety processes in place. They have auditable programs that they need to comply with for food safety and quality assurance,” she said.
“We have no idea, at this stage, where in the supply chain this happened. Growers can guarantee that when their product leaves their farm it’s safe. But then there are other points at which the produce is handled on its way to the shelf in the supermarket, or the green grocer."
Queensland's peak horticulture body, Growcom, said "poor co-ordination of the handling of this matter between the state authorities and overly emotional messages has effectively wiped out a significant sector of farming during peak season for what was effectively a very minor public health risk".
The group's spokeswoman, Rachel Mackenzie, said the group would be working with state governments to create a system that could address heath and safety threats while reducing "unnecessary threats to the livelihood of farmers and their families".
Reporter for The Age
Darren is the mining and agribusiness reporter for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
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