Manuka authentication

[John B]

Received another message this week from MPI about how they are progressing with the Manuka standard. Looks like it will only take another year or 2 to go through all the peer reviews et cetera. Shame they didn' t get it right in the first place. I don' t blame them for attempting a standard as there was certainly a lot of let' s say less than honest operators out there but the standard has ruined some people who didn' t deserve it. We always worked on the, looks like Manuka, taste like Manuka probably is Manuka. I have often wondered why they didn' t just use people' s harvest declarations i.e. if a packer of buys 10 tons of manuka off one beekeeper 10 tons of clover from another and 10 ton of honeydew from someone else and then sells 30 tons of manuka then someone is not playing the game. surely harvest declarations have some potential use or are they just another piece of bureaucratic waste paper.
I hate to think what they are spending on this review and I also strongly suspect that in the end we will end up keeping what we' ve got.
I have not been too badly affected by this standard but I do have some honey that rates as non-manuka even though I know it is about 1/3 manuka and if I mixed it with the right amount of clover it would magically become manuka\multi-floral. Perhaps the worst affected are those with manuka\Kanuka honey which tends to fail while manuka\other honeys can pass easily even with a lot lower percentage of manuka.
These standards have not caused the current oversupply situation but they certainly haven' t helped.

 

[Bron]

It seems to me that if ’they’ alter the current Manuka standard too much they open themselves up to a class action law suit. There’s some that have benefited from the current situation and more that have not.

Yes, something needed to be done, but it needed to be done right the first time.