Agriculture Business Week

The 20th annual convention of the Philippine Society of Animal Nutritionists (PHILSAN) held on October was well-attended by animal nutritionists and other people representing various sectors of the animal industry. The theme of the convention was very appropriate and timely: “Feed and Food Safety: From the feedmill to the table.” Only a few lecture topics were presented but all very relevant to the ever growing concerns on food safety.

There can be no timelier topic than food safety for discussion among people and professionals involved in animal agriculture. We have heard of news concerning unsafe food and human illnesses that could be gotten from contaminated meat, milk, eggs, and other agricultural products. There were news stories about food containing hazardous microbes and toxic chemicals such as formalin, melamine and dioxin; of meat derived from diseased animals or animals that had died before slaughter; of imported moldy hams in time for Christmas, to mention just a few.

Stories like these have been circulating in the media for decades; sometimes they hog the headlines and catch our attention, sometimes they don’t. But one thing is sure; food borne health problems are amongst us, and we in the business of animal agriculture have significant roles in reducing the impact of these problems.

Many food-related health problems could be traced back to the preharvest stage, to various factors involved in the way animals are raised and treated in the farm before they are slaughtered and used as human food. The other half of the problem, of course, lies at the postharvest stage, in how the animals are slaughtered, and how animal products are handled, processed, and stored.

A couple of months before the convention, I got an invitation from PHILSAN, through one of its donor member ELANCO Animal Health, to give a talk on the subject of food safety or food hygiene. Since this was my first chance to speak in a convention of animal nutritionists, I gladly accepted the invitation. After some minor kinks in deciding with the organizers on what subject to present, I ended up presenting two lecture topics: one on the use and misuse of beta agonist lean-enhancing agents in pigs, and the other on general subject of food safety and animal production.

“Beta-agonists” has been a buzzword among livestock, especially swine, producers since the 1980s. Beta-agonists, such as clenbuterol and salbutamol, have been used as lean-enhancing feed additives for pigs and other livestock. While their effectiveness in improving the lean-to-fat ratio in meat is well known, beta-agonists used for this purpose are not without danger to human consumers. There have been reports of fatal and nonfatal incidents of human poisoning with clenbuterol residues in meat and meat products worldwide.

For this reason our own Department of Agriculture (DA) banned the use of most beta-agonist additives as lean enhancing agent in livestock. The DA, however, approved ractopamine, also classed as a beta-agonist, as a lean-enhancing agent in pigs. Ractopamine has been shown effective as a lean-enhancer, but unlike the other beta-agonists, it has been proven safe for humans based on unequivocal scientific evidence. Unlike clenbuterol and other beta-agonists, ractopamine has no medical use intended for humans. It was developed mainly for the purpose of lean-enhance
ment in pigs.

In the second lecture, I emphasized the significant role nutritionists, animal scientists, veterinarians and farm owners have in ensuring food safety at least in the preharvest stage or before the animals are sent out of the farm gate. From the slaughterhouse to the processing plant and eventually to retail outlets, these are also risk points for food safety.

Clean food is for everyone, rich and poor. Selling to public meats and meat products from animals that had died of disease (”double-dead” meat) is unthinkable in a modern civilized society. The impact of quality food on health has not yet reached the level of public awareness it has already reached in Europe, Japan, North America, Australia, and other countries. In these countries, consumers’ demands in terms of food safety are so strong that these demands are largely dictating what food should be put on the market.

Another speaker, Jose-Maria Hernandez from Spain, in this same convention corroborated the ideas on food safety that I meant to get across to the audience. He presented results of surveys related to food safety and quality in the European Community. He showed that Europeans put importance first and foremost on food safety, above anything else including cost. He discussed several definitions of “food quality”. Of the several definitions he mentioned, what impressed me most was that “quality is information”, which I assumed to mean factual information. The consumers need to know things that they should know about the food they buy and eat. They need to know that the animals from which their food comes from had been raised with care and respect, fed with clean feeds and safe feed additives, medicated when sick. They need to be assured that the food they buy and eat is wholesome and free of contamination with chemicals and disease-producing microbes and toxins.

One concern raised during my presentation was about the additional cost to be incurred for tests and other monitoring procedures for food quality and safety. Procedures for ensuring food safety or quality no doubt require additional costs on the part of production, of processing, and of proper storage. These additional costs need not be expensive in the long run. Government agencies, such as the Bureau of Animal Industry and Bureau of Food and Drugs, have banned drugs and feed additives for use in farm animals. It would be very expensive, not to say tedious, to test each and every pig slaughtered for the presence of residues of banned drugs like clenbuterol or chloramphenicol.

Adopting good animal production practices, manufacture and compounding of clean animal feeds using legally approved additives, and observing judicious use and withdrawal periods of antibiotics and other medicines contribute significantly in ensuring food safety and quality. There should be a structured procedure to audit, verify, and certify various practices involved in maintaining food safety.