By Donald MacKay
I have no children, but I know that losing a child is a devastating experience for any parent, so I understand the anger and fear when children are dying because of food poisoning. Politicians are driven by few things more than angry and fearful people blaming them for not adequately regulating the food their kids are eating, but formulating policy in the midst of a wave of fear and anger is going to almost always yield the worst outcomes.
Foreign spaza shop owners are the go-to bad guys when just about anything goes wrong, despite there seldom being any evidence of their crimes, aside from perhaps illegal migration, which any sane person would agree is not a capital offence. Yet, it’s not terribly unusual to have mobs of South African mobs trying to lynch foreigners and burning down their stores. Minister McKenzie, I’m looking at you when you say, “[w]e need to close all these [foreign-owned] shops. We can’t be debating this matter. The shops should be closed and owners arrested to be deported. What more do we want to see, more children dying?”
Without for a moment trying to minimise the horror of very real dead children, to assume this is because of foreigners is just weak-brained thinking. In 2017, we all learnt the devastating word “listeriosis,” as one of South Africa’s largest food producers was responsible for the deaths of 216 people due to contaminated water in one of their food plants. No foreigners were involved.
In that same annus horribilis, Carte Blanche told the nation how a certain national butchery chain had been: tampering with meat labels, selling spoiled meat, re-labelling expired products to extend their sell-by dates, and washing and re-marinating used ribs before resealing them with new expiry dates. Sis. The said chain recalled products from nine stores and tried to interdict Carte Blanche from airing the episode (they failed). As far as I can tell, no one was prosecuted, not even foreigners. Oh, maybe that’s because this was a 100% South African scam.
In 2011, City Press reported that a local chicken producer admitted to “having thawed frozen chickens after the expiry date, treated the meat with chlorine, injecting them with brine, and attaching a new expiry date.” I can find no evidence of any action being taken besides a stern rebuke. No foreigners here either.
In February 2011, the Department of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (DAFF), as it was then known, issued a notice referring to the abuse by a certain producer by injecting excessive quantities of brine into chicken, in some instances ranging from 30% to 60% in individual quick frozen portions. DAFF updated their regulations to cap brining at 15%. This was supported by a University of the Free State study which found that “one of the well-known [chicken] brands analysed weighed 48.37% less when all the fluid had been cooked out of the chicken.”
In 2016, the South African Poultry Association (SAPA) went to court to challenge the updated chicken brining regulations. In the SAPA judgement, Justice Fabricius notes that “Unfortunately there are irresponsible operators that abuse the process of injecting poultry products solely to maximise financial gain. Unofficial reports indicate that some poultry is extended by up to 40%, resulting in a poor quality product with high thawing and cooking losses.”
None of this is to justify what is happening to children right now, but before the mob breaks out their pitchforks and tiki torches, let’s consider the full set of laws around food safety and how they are implemented, not only when it’s convenient to blame foreigners in the townships.
Donald MacKay is founder and chief executive of XA Global Trade Advisors. MacKay has been advising local and foreign companies on global trade issues for more than two decades. X handle: XA_advisors; email: donald@ xagta.com; website: xagta.com. The views in this column are independent of Business Report and Independent Media.