Meat research payouts not shown in reports THE nation's peak meat-processing research body has made undisclosed payments worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Australian arm of the world's largest meat company, which is controlled by one of the research body's board members. John Berry, who is on the board of the Australian Meat Processor Corporation and is also a director of JBS Australia, denies there is anything untoward in the payments, says such payments are common and, when questioned about a particular payment of $86,585, could not remember which project it was for because the various arms of his company received many such payments. The Australian can reveal AMPC, which is funded through industry levies, made large undisclosed research payments to the nation's biggest meat packer, JBS Australia. Such payments are intended to fund collaborative research projects and, in many cases, are matched by equal or greater amounts of public money provided through Meat and Livestock Australia, according to documents obtained by The Australian. The AMPC -- the meat-processing equivalent of Meat and Livestock Australia -- did not declare related party transactions for its directors in any of its past five annual reports. AMPC and MLA are industry-owned service organisations that do research, development and marketing on behalf of the red-meat industry. Together with LiveCorp, another service organisation that promotes the live export trade, the three have collectively spent more than $700 million on research and development over the past decade -- about half of which was public money provided through dollar-for-dollar matching grants paid by the commonwealth through MLA. None of the three publishes detailed accounts of who receives the money, what they spend it on or how the benefits of such expenditures are quantified. MLA and AMPC in particular have been criticised for failing to disclose where the funds were invested. The Australian has obtained internal AMPC documents detailing the research payments and their recipients. Under one funding model, industry participants who are awarded the research grants put forward one-quarter of the cost of the proposal, AMPC pays one-quarter from processor levies and the remainder is provided by the federal government and MLA. According to the AMPC documents, Swift Australia -- also known as JBS Australia -- received $86,585 from AMPC in 2008. MLA and the federal government provided a further $173,000, while Swift Australia provided $86,000 itself for the research. Mr Berry said Swift Australia had also received funding over the past three years but did not state how much. Several industry insiders familiar with the documents said confidentially that they judged the documents to be accurate. Mr Berry confirmed that JBS Australia had received funding grants from AMPC that had not been disclosed in AMPC's accounts. He said there was nothing untoward in such undisclosed payments as board members were not involved in authorising grants and this was handled by AMPC executives. "I don't think it is required (to be disclosed as) a related party transaction because none of the directors have a say in approving projects," Mr Berry said. The point being is that they are entitled, as levy payers, to access for research and development, so there is nothing untoward. His comments are likely to inflame those farmers and meat processors whose applications have been rejected and whose companies often compete with those of AMPC directors. AMPC chief executive Michelle Edge declined to comment on the matter, stating she had "only been in the job five months." The Australian was directed to AMPC deputy chairman Stephen Kelly, who repeatedly refused to comment on any matter relating to AMPC. The Productivity Commission concluded in a report released last week that the lack of transparency surrounding the "money-go-round" of research and development spending by rural development corporations such as MLA and AMPC was "of paramount concern." "As a result, it is hard to be certain about how much in total is being spent on rural R&D, with whom it is being spent, and which parties are ultimately providing the funding," the commission's report said. Labor MP Janelle Saffin said the whole industry needed fresh scrutiny following a Senate inquiry in 2002 that criticised the industry's lack of transparency and made recommendations for reform, none of which had been implemented. More than 1000 beef producers and processors voted at a meeting in Armidale in February last year to support a motion calling for a wide-ranging inquiry into the beef industry and significant restructuring. A further 500 supported those calls at a meeting in Rockhampton in July. Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig has the power to audit MLA and AMPC's accounts under the government's agreements with the industry.