M.I.A.
OPINION: The previous government spent too much during the Covid-19 pandemic, despite warnings from officials, according to a briefing released by the Treasury.
The Government's so called 'consolidation of Rapid Antigen Tests (RAT) from meat companies has the potential to force the closure of some meat processing plants if staff contract the Omicron version of Covid.
Many meat processing companies took the precaution of purchasing their own RATs as a means of protecting their staff and keeping their works going in a Covid outbreak. However, because, on the Government's behalf, the Ministry of Health failed to get sufficient supplies in on time, it effectively pilfered what it could from the private sector.
Meat Industry Association (MIA) policy manager Paul Goldstone told Rural News that meat companies had purchased the now Government-appropriated RATs as a means of screening workers and preventing the virus getting into plants. He says an Omicron outbreak would be disastrous for the sector and could lead to whole plants being closed down.
Goldstone says the RAT issue is also linked to the rules around home isolation. He points out some workers live in households where there are large numbers of people of varying age groups, who all work in the meat sector.
Goldstone says the current government rules on isolation pose a serious risk to the meat industry.
"We have been pushing hard for some realism with the current criteria," he told Rural News. "A single positive case of Covid in a worker or a household member could result in that entire household being isolated for 10 days."
Goldstone says this could see large parts of a plant being put into isolation and likely shut down.
"We were going to be using RATs to act as a form of screening to prevent infected workers getting on site," he explains. "The meat companies purchased RATs to minimise this risk, but without them, plants are now at risk and so are valuable meat exports."
NZPork has appointed Auckland-based Paul Bucknell as its new chair.
The Government claims to have delivered on its election promise to protect productive farmland from emissions trading scheme (ETS) but red meat farmers aren’t happy.
Foot and Mouth Disease outbreaks could have a detrimental impact on any country's rural sector, as seen in the United Kingdom's 2000 outbreak that saw the compulsory slaughter of over six million animals.
The Ministry for the Environment is joining as a national award sponsor in the Ballance Farm Environment Awards (BFEA from next year).
Kiwis are wasting less of their food than they were two years ago, and this has been enough to push New Zealand’s total household food waste bill lower, the 2025 Rabobank KiwiHarvest Food Waste survey has found.
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