Europe a weak link in the native food chain

From the Sydney Morning Herald
Joel Gibson
INDIGENOUS Australians have eaten them for tens of thousands of years and scientists are now telling us they are among the world's best sources of vitamins and anti-oxidants.
But sales of Australian native foods are being hindered by stringent international laws that treat them as "novel foods" alongside genetically modified crops and food engineered by state-of-the-art nanotechnology.
It is one of the reasons, say industry experts, that a dozen Australian "superfruits" are still a novelty on menus from Paris to London and Montreal. Sibylla Hess-Buschmann, a native foods grower and researcher, has spent the past 18 months collecting documentation to prove that ancient Australian foods such as lemon myrtle and Kakadu plum are not novel exports to the European Union.
Since the establishment of the EU and the mad cow disease scare, stringent food safety regulations have required importers to prove products are not new, or face shipments being impounded. South American countries have called the EU's policies protectionist and appealed to the World Trade Organisation for fairer access to EU markets for traditional foods.