Irritated growers have voiced their frustrations about complications they say are being added to assured produce schemes.
The comments were made at a British Independent Fruit Growers Association (Bifga) meeting in Kent. John Breach, Bifga chairman, said recently that amidst rapidly increasing hostility towards these schemes, some growers have been openly talking about a mass boycott of assurance schemes.
Clive Baxter, Kent grower and regional chairman for the Horticultural Development Council (HDC) tree-fruit panel, said that initial grower support for voluntary food-safety initiatives is disappearing beneath a pile of complexity and paperwork.
“There is growing disquiet within the fruit-growing community that assurance schemes are now too bureaucratic in their implementation,” said Baxter. Most growers understand the need for schemes, but the audit procedures are too complicated, long-winded and impractical, he added.
“The level of complaints that have reached the HDC tree-fruit panel is unprecedented. We seem incapable in the UK of applying common sense, and have become obsessed by gold plating schemes with no apparent benefit, except to our overseas competitors,” said Baxter.
Growers at the meeting called for a curb on the increasing demands of what is supposedly a voluntary scheme, and restraint of the Assured Farm Standards. “It is patently clear this scheme is not voluntary,” said one leading grower.
James Smith, whose family farms near Maidstone, Kent, said that for some jobs, risk assessment in practical terms is nonsense, using the example of having a locked-up room or cabinet for crop-protection chemicals. “The materials are either locked up safely with a strong lock in a room or they aren’t, and I would know that,” said Smith, claiming that the asking of further questions on whether it was safely locked was insulting his intelligence.
Growers have become jumpy and the unnecessary weight of demands is causing stress. “It detracts from us doing the proper job of producing safe food,” Smith said.
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