`Chemists' Meeting Was Members Only - Olive Oil Times
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Chemists' Meeting Was Members Only

By Jean-Louis Barjol
Mar. 26, 2012 07:53 UTC
Summary Summary

The IOC did not exclude experts from non-IOC mem­ber coun­tries from a recent chemists’ meet­ing, as all observers were barred from attend­ing regard­less of their affil­i­a­tion. The meet­ing was restricted to offi­cial gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives, and the IOC stands by its sen­sory test­ing method as an essen­tial qual­ity cri­te­rion for olive oil.

It is not true that the IOC kept experts from non-IOC mem­ber coun­tries out of the recent chemists’ meet­ing. The fact of the mat­ter is that all observers were barred from attend­ing the meet­ing, regard­less of whether they were from IOC mem­ber or non-mem­ber coun­tries.

The meet­ing was restricted to offi­cial gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives. It is nor­mal that the IOC should wish to hold a Members-only meet­ing now and then. If an Organisation usu­ally gives open access to its meet­ings and freely cir­cu­lates the meet­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion, this doesn’t mean it must always do so. It’s quite enti­tled to allow observers to attend or not. When other Organisations (WHO, WTO, …) have restricted the access to some of their meet­ings, I’ve never heard com­plaints from jour­nal­ists.

SEE ALSO:
Non-Member Chemists Kept Out of Olive Council Meeting
Nor is it true to say that some peo­ple were denied access to the IOC web site. The truth is that, quite log­i­cally, observers were denied access to the doc­u­ments cir­cu­lated on the agenda busi­ness for this par­tic­u­lar meet­ing.

Last, IOC would be very inter­ested to know about the ​“range of sources” that spoke about a debate ​“to reduce, or even elim­i­nate, the use of sen­sory pan­els in deter­min­ing olive oil qual­ity”. Maybe it’s the peo­ple who like to give a dog a bad name and hang him, or who want to cre­ate their own panel recog­ni­tion scheme and oust the IOC from this activ­ity. Whoever they may be, I can assure you that at the IOC we think very highly of our sen­sory test­ing method (which was not actu­ally dis­cussed at the chemists’ meet­ing) and we con­sider it to be an essen­tial qual­ity cri­te­rion.

The fact that we’re mak­ing con­stant efforts to involve more pan­els in our pro­fi­ciency check tests for IOC recog­ni­tion and that we’re offer­ing help to train new pan­els is ample proof that we have no inten­tion of aban­don­ing it.

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