Ever since the 1906 publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle – which unwittingly exposed unsanitary practices in the American meatpacking industry – food safety and hygiene have been increasingly important factors for the consuming public.
For most Australians, food safety is fortunately not something that is even on their radar – they front up to their local supermarket and they expect that all necessary regulations and requirements have been met and that the chosen product will be fit for purpose, which is pretty bloody remarkable given all of the phases of production and people that handle a product before it appears in a supermarket aisle.
This is not surprising as the evidence shows that people, by and large, like and trust farmers – they are just not too sure that they like farming.
This is borne out by a 2013 ‘Essential Media Survey’, which noted that agriculture was the most trusted sector of the economy to act in the public interest, with 72 per cent of the 1000 respondents having ‘a lot or some trust’ with the sector.
However, as soon as an enterprise starts to get any sort of production scale or practice in an area where animal husbandry is required, the public goodwill wanes and it is replaced in some quarters by outright hostility.
Anyone with a passing interest in social media would acknowledge that scientific knowledge no longer carries the weight it once did. Fools are blind to their own foolishness.
We live in an age where we have more information than ever previously available at our fingertips, yet we have never been so uninformed.
Our reality is that we are always outgunned by agriculture’s adversaries – bringing a knife to a gunfight if you will.
As much as I am regularly dismayed at the wafer-thin rhetoric, half-truths and misleading arguments that activist groups perpetually run, you have to give them begrudging credit for their ability to stay on message and fundraise in support of that message.
While we must never stop trying to educate the general public, history has more than amply shown the ag industry that we are settling ourselves up for a Sisyphean task if we think that this will build trust over time.
There should be no doubt that the ag industry needs to commit to transparency at every level.
Only by letting people peer behind the curtains and demystify what we are doing, will we free ourselves from activist oversight.
To state the bleeding obvious, it also lets industry participants to control the narrative, and to clearly dispel any notion that the procedures being performed are safe and/or necessary.
In the long term the cost of implementing transparency will be a small price to pay, compared to the inevitable regulatory burden that is imposed on industry following any fresh scandal.
– Trent Thorne, agribusiness lawyer
