NZ food labelling sparks debate in Parliament

A fight nearly broke out in Parliament today over mandarins. On one side was Labour Party MP Damien O'Connor, saying that shoppers were being lied to about where their fruit came from. On the other was powerful Food and Grocery Council head, Katherine Rich, who is strongly against making it compulsory for companies to say where their food is from.

Their war of words began when a select committee was shown pictures of mandarins, capsicums, and pears on New Zealand supermarket shelves which were marketed as being from New Zealand but were actually from Chile, the United States, Italy and the Netherlands.

"How can we trust a voluntary [labelling] scheme when your members are lying?" O'Connor asked Rich. "We have got photos - that's lying to the public," O'Connor said.

Rich said it was probably a mistake, and that her members were not responsible for supermarket signage.

"Are we seriously thinking that the poor supermarket worker who stacked that shelf set out to mislead the consumer?"

The argument came on a day when many of New Zealand's biggest companies lined up to oppose proposed changes to food labelling. A bill in the name of a Green Party MP Steffan Browning would make it mandatory for all single ingredient foods including fruit, vegetables, fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, nuts, oils and flour, to have country of origin labels.

Read more at nzherald.co.nz