Thus, APIA pockets a fee for the grant of a licence. The licensed producer is made responsible for enforcing the standards under the certified trademark. If a producer is found by an auditor to be conducting an even more inhumane system than the trademark allows, the peak body can express a few pious clichés about “rotten apples” and the system stays in place.
There is therefore little incentive for APIA to use discretion or character checks when granting licences. Even the auditors are appointed by the APIA.
How humane is the APIA “Free Range” proposal? The answer is not very. You do not have to take our jaundiced attitudes. In the Turi Foods’case, mentioned above, the stocking density of chickens was found to be 30.92kg per square metre of floor area. The APIA proposal is for a comparable stocking density of 28kg per square metre. Turi Foods consented to the order that its conduct was a misleading use of the term “free to roam”. The official standards proposed for the term Free Range are almost as bad as those that produced the fine. Not a very encouraging start.
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It turns out that Turi Foods is a member of the APIA.
Like Kennedy in Berlin, poultry producers will be able to say: “We are all Free Rangers now”.
No longer will we have to be careful at the supermarket shelves. There will be no need for shonky producers to label themselves “Elysian Fields”, for they will be inside the tent.
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About the Authors
Stephen Keim has been a legal practitioner for 30 years, the last 23 of which have been as a barrister. He became a Senior Counsel for the State of Queensland in 2004. Stephen is book reviews editor for the Queensland Bar Association emagazine Hearsay. Stephen is President of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights and is also Chair of QPIX, a non-profit film production company that develops the skills of emerging film makers for their place in industry.
Jordan Sosnowski is an Associate Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She graduated from Monash University with a Master of Laws, Juris Doctor and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Queensland, majoring in Philosophy and English Literature. Jordan is the recipient of a Summer Research Grant from Michigan State University and is currently working in the field of legal research for the Animal Legal & Historical Web Center.
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