Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has made further palliative moves in response to the horse meat scandal, currently raging in the UK. The scandal erupted in January when beef burgers on sale in a number of supermarkets were found to contain traces of meat from other animals; since then it has snowballed.

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The Defra chief promised a raft of measures and a second meeting with industry leaders in the space of a week, during a speech in Parliament on Monday (11th January). However, food policy experts maintain that the government's response has been too slow and too narrow in focus to prove effective.

They claim that blaming a systemic problem on 'a few bad eggs' in the food supply chain ignores the realities of the modern "lowest common denominator food system," and policy moves towards self-regulation in the supply chain from slaughter houses to supermarkets.

Addressing the Commons on Monday, the Environment Secretary updated MPs on Defra's response to the ongoing scandal. He said, "On Saturday 9th February I called in the major food retailers, manufacturers and distributors to make clear my expectation that they needed to verify and trace the source of all their processed beef products without delay."

In that meeting Paterson demanded test results from processors by the end of the current week, more DNA testing throughout the supply chain and publication of industry test results every three months through the FSA.

On Monday, he announced that he would meet with industry representatives again on Tuesday, and that he had been in touch with his opposite numbers in Ireland, France, Romania, as well as European Consumers' Affairs Commissioner Tonio Borg over the debacle. The issue will be on the agenda of the next European Agriculture Council on 25th February.

Paterson said, "The main responsibility for the safety and authenticity of food lies with those who produce, sell or provide it to the consumer. At the moment this appears to be an issue of fraud and mis-labelling, but if anything suggests the need for changes to surveillance and enforcement in the UK we will not hesitate to make those changes.

"Once we have established the full facts of the current incidents and identified where enforcement action can be taken, we will want to look at the lessons to be learned from this episode. I will make a further statement about this in due course."

Shortly after Monday's commons debate, which was called by Labour ministers, supermarket giant Tesco announced that it had discovered quantities of horse meat in its Everyday Value Spaghetti Bolognese. Tesco was at the centre of the first horse-meat scandal, which was uncovered by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) last month. In tests carried out at the request of FSA and government, Tesco Bolognese was found to contain over 60 percent horse meat in some cases.

Government approach called into question as scandal deepens

The consumer crisis has spread across Europe, with a number of French supermarkets announcing this week that they have removed lines of processed meat products manufactured by frozen food company Findus from their shelves. Such stark evidence of convolution and lack of transparency in the European meat industry has impacted severely on consumer confidence.

However, although Defra and FSA have requested testing for all processed beef products in the UK this week in an effort to reassure shoppers, the burden may prove too large for the UK's surveillance faculties, which have been hit by cuts. FSA now employs around half the number of inspectors it did when it was set up in 2000.

Professor Karel Williams of Manchester Business School said that even in spite of cuts the horsemeat situation, or one like it, is an inevitability given the state of the current food system.

Professor Williams told Farming Online, "The official line is that horsemeat is not a food safety issue, we are the victims of mafia fraud and the supermarkets should test more. This is both naive and a distraction. The problem is long and constantly shifting adversarial supply chains, where processors are buying in on price and the delivery by 40 tonne chiller truck comes from somewhere different each week."

He added that a study from the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change shows that less cavalier approaches to producing affordable food are available, including the Morrisons model; the supermarket owns its processing plants. However, these are rejected by most major supermarkets because they are "buyer led organisations," which are actually not directly responsible for producing the vast majority of goods they sell.  

The professor continued, "The [horsemeat scare] is what academics call a 'normal accident'; inevitable sooner or later because it is inherent in system design. And it is unnecessary because we can have tight control of a short chain and no accidents if the industry adopts the Morrisons model of vertical integration. It's time to change supermarket business models and to take action for food security before we lose what's left of UK food production and processing."

Although there have been suggestions from some quarters that the use of banned horse drug bute in horsemeat could present a health risk, the only evidence of bute contamination associated with the present scandal has been in meat exported from the UK to France; FSA revealed at the beginning of the month that meat from a horse given the drug had been exported in 2012.