Australia: Focus on Red Meat

The Australian red meat industry’s commitment to food safety continues beyond the farm gate, with a unique set of industry quality assurance programs covering livestock transport, feedlots and sale yards. These include the aforementioned NFAS and the NLIS programs.

“NFAS is an initiative designed to ensure product quality and integrity in beef feedlots,” Jenson explains. “It covers a wide range of environmental, animal welfare, veterinary practices, and feed ingredients and residues standards. The NLIS is a traceability system to document the movement of cattle, sheep and goats and provides assurance of product integrity, safety, and market eligibility.”

Meat Processing Quality Assurance

At the processing level, Australia’s meat food safety and quality record is a result of Australian Government regulation and industry quality assurance based on food science, touts MLA, contending that this is achieved through regulation and residue testing by the Australian DoA.

“In addition to this, Australian export processing plants have QA measures in the form of mandatory QA for product description and the implementation of HACCP-based QA,” Jenson relates. “Australian export-registered meat processing plants must also have an approved Halal program operating if they are to produce Halal products.”

Meat Safety

An ongoing focus on food safety is a priority for the Australian red meat industry. MLA is involved in meat safety and education at the industry and consumer level, providing information on key food safety issues throughout the food chain.

“A major strength of the Australian beef industry is its disease free, ‘clean and green’ image,” Jenson boasts. “The adoption of the NLIS, which requires cattle to be given an electronic identification ear tag at an early age, contributes to this distinction. As any animal progresses through the supply chain, it can be tracked via the NLIS.”

For Jenson, the benefits of electronic identification technology bring to mind the case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) detected in a dairy cow in the state of Washington in late December 2003, which led the Japanese to suspend U.S. beef imports (intermittently) until July 27, 2006.

“If BSE were to be detected in Australian cattle, the NLIS could trace the animal and locate others that were raised together in a very short time,” he relates. “Australia was the first country to introduce such a system and it has given Australia improved access to many markets.”

So what are the most recent beef safety initiatives in Australia?

“Australia continues to invest in research and development directed at demonstrating and improving food safety and other aspects of product quality to meet the expectations of customers,” Jenson says. “For example, of relevance to the U.S. market, MLA has invested heavily in understanding the behavior of E. coli in our production and processing systems, demonstrating a low prevalence of this microbe and a low risk of illness when Australian manufacturing beef is consumed in hamburgers in the United States.”

Recent MLA-funded research demonstrated the low prevalence of antibiotic resistant Salmonella and E. coli in Australian beef cattle. “We want to stay ahead of the market on issues like antibiotic resistance,” Jenson points out. “The very low prevalence we have found should give confidence to our customers and it tells us that we don’t need to make big changes to our production systems to stay this way.”

The attention to meeting customer expectations doesn’t stop with scientific research, Jenson emphasizes. “Australian processors also meet all U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) requirements, even when those requirements exceed, or are just plain different, to Australian domestic requirements,” he relates. “Inspection of all cattle by veterinarians and testing every lot of manufacturing beef for E. coli O157 and the other Shiga toxin-producing E. coli regulated by FSIS are two examples.”