CONFUSION over liability for contamination breaches of the National Vendor Declaration (NVD) remained unresolved at the Meat and Livestock Australia annual general meeting in Sydney recently.
Producers are confused and the information coming from regulators and the industry body did not do a whole lot to quell their fears.
Queensland beef producer Joanne Ray, a member of the Property Rights Australia group, was calling for an update to the Livestock Production Assurance (LPA) NVD form to ensure producers were not held responsible for possible contamination
from mining chemicals.
“If we seek our own legal advice, it would be don’t sign the NVD,” said Mrs Ray, of Cunnawarra.
“If you don’t sign the NVD, you don’t sell the cattle, so this has to be done as an industry, handled as an industry – the wording of the NVD has to be changed in some way.”
She said so far there had only been a couple of known instances there cattle could have been contaminated and at least one instance where there was contamination “and mining companies have been very good at dealing with it”.
“But as time goes by, you get more mining companies, you change ownership, they are owned by different people with different philosophies and everything can change,” she said.
“We need to make sure producers who sign the NVDs are protected from any liability.”
Mrs Ray raised the concerns after a member asked the MLA board why it would not publicly release legal advice it had obtained on where a producer stands if contamination was found in meat or stock.
“Mining companies themselves are unaware that we have withholding periods and export slaughtering rules on all the chemicals we use, so it is a whole area they haven’t even thought of, and they need to be made aware,” Mrs Ray said.
MLA boss Richard Norton told the meeting the liability of producers who signed NVDs was not part of the legal advice sort, and the advice was given on the basis it would not be
made public.
“If such advice was sought, and a legal firm agreed to such advice, it is likely it would only be of a general nature, as the circumstance and conditions for producers across the country will be different,” he said.
“Additionally NVD requirements are regulated by individual State governments; the project was initiated by peak industry councils and funded by MLA, at their request.
“The legal advice was prepared for MLA and peak industry councils for the use by peak industry councils in the advocacy activities and to inform policy – MLA has no capacity to
influence legislation.”
Safemeat chair Ross Keane said by signing the NVD producers were only declaring what they personally had done to the livestock and land and there was nothing obligating people to declare outside contaminants.