A lopsided food safety policy

Now in its fifth year of ‘operation,’ following the passage in the National Assembly of the Food Safety Bill of 2016, not a great deal has been publicly disseminated about the work of the National Food Safety Authority (NFSA) nor has the agency benefitted from the kind of reporting that draws pointed attention to those undertakings in which it engages and the outcomes thereof. The only reason for the recent fleeting reference to the agency has been the fact of the current near-countrywide flooding and its implications for food safety which can go way beyond those that come immediately into the minds of the uninitiated. Even then, the role of the NFSA has not been specifically underlined.

Flood-related food safety considerations can extend way beyond the immediate period of floods and their aftermath which last for considerably lengthier periods without losing their capability to compromise human health. Beyond the linkage between flooding and food safety there are other considerations, not least of which are the challenges associated with monitoring our food imports at a time when the global trade in foods deemed to be potentially harmful to human health is worth billions of dollars. One says this to say that in principle, at least, the NFSA is an important national agency whose work should go way beyond the kind of deskbound focus which all too frequently attends the behaviour of entities whose rightful places are out there attending to their practical portfolios.

As has already been mentioned, not a great deal has been heard about the National Food Safety Authority (NFSA) up until now, mention of it being made the in the World Food Safety Day message by Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha, as one of a suite of state agencies supporting the Ministry as “advocates for foods that are of international standards, free of contaminants, bacteria and naturally occurring toxins or any substance that may make food injurious to life.” Mind you, as has just been mentioned, the best way to recognise the work of an agency is when its pursuits are paraded for public scrutiny and assessment. That is as it should be.

We can recall, up until now, no prominent initiative in the area of food safety that has been undertaken by the NFSA though we concede that this might not be because it has been sitting still but simply for the reason of the mercurial disposition which government, and particularly the Ministry of Agriculture, among other state agencies, have to the dissemination of information. These observations are being made at a time when, for obvious reasons, food safety has become a matter of particular national concern and at a time, moreover, when those concerns have, intermittently given rise to pretty frenetic public discourse. All the more reason for the question as to why the establishment of the NFSA has, seemingly, been attended by a near deafening silence about its particular responsibilities and how the Authority is going about its fulfillment. One makes this point particular in the circumstances where it has appeared that for many years, the fight to push back the proliferation of unhealthy foods through the monitoring of local food safety practices and protocols and, as best the agency can, fend off the proliferation of potentially unhealthy food imports, has fallen largely to the Government Analyst-Food & Drugs Department. (GA-FDD)

Insofar as we are told there is, indeed, an entity known as the NFSA that functions within the Ministry of Agriculture, though, and even taking account of the fact that the GA-FDD is a department of a different ministry, it appears incomprehensible that given what appears to be the central role being played by the Department in the execution of national food safety policy, it is (or at least so it seems) altogether detached from the NFSA.

Monday’s World Food Safety Day Message from the Minister of Agriculture lists the Pesticides and Toxic Chemicals (Control) Board, the Guyana Marketing Corporation, the National Agricultural Research & Extension Institute and the GFSA as agencies that will benefit from “special attention” insofar as the “maximising” of their operations are concerned. Mind-bogglingly, that “special attention” does not, it seems, extend to the GA-FDD, one of the most shabbily treated state agencies over several political administrations and one which has been playing a no less hands-on role in food safety administration than those mentioned in the Minister’s message. Here, one might well ask whether the NFSA ought not to have been a multiagency organisation which would have meant that its work would have benefitted directly from the particular contribution that the GA-FDD makes to the overall national food safety effort.

If there can be no question than that our circumstances warrant the existence of some centralised body that oversees the safeguarding of food safety when it suddenly emerges into the public glare against the backdrop of a ministerial World Food Safety Day Message and when its emergence bares the omission of what is almost certainly the country’s key state agency with responsibility for food safety, in its widest sense, then something is seriously wrong and must be corrected with due haste. It is either that or the overarching collaborative role which the state agencies have in the execution of government policy continues to be littered with anomalies and vulnerable to public bewilderment.