‘India has a long way to go on food safety’
THE MAN who helped spark one of India’s largest food recalls – prompting Nestlé’s top executive to rush to New Delhi last week – says government authorities lack the resources for widespread inspections.
VK Pandey’s team in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, randomly picked about a dozen packs of Nestlé’s Maggi instant noodles for a series of tests. The results showed that lead levels breached official limits, triggering a recall across a swathe of India and import bans in Nepal and Singapore.
“We would’ve sent more samples of Maggi, but we have a manpower shortage,” Pandey, an officer with Uttar Pradesh’s Food Safety and Drug Administration in Barabanki district, said. “There’s been one vacancy open for three years.”
Nestlé, whose local unit has seen its shares decline about 15 percent this month, said it would remove all instant noodles from Indian shelves to boost trust.
Global chief executive Paul Bulcke told reporters that the company had tested more than 1 000 batches of noodles and found the India-produced Maggi to be “safe and well within the regulatory limits”.
“With the consumer in mind, we will do everything it takes, and are fully engaged with the authorities to clarify the situation to have Maggi noodles back on the shelves at the earliest,” Bulcke told reporters in New Delhi on Friday.
Credible regulator
The crisis marks the highest profile case for India’s sevenyear-old national food regulator and the patchwork of local agencies responsible for ensuring food is safe across the country. While India has made progress on food safety, it has a long way to go.
“The government should have a pan-India monitoring system across food categories, but it doesn’t,” Amit Khurana, the programme manager for the food safety team at the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, said. “We hear it every time in the field: The state doesn’t have appropriate resources, there are a lot of vacancies, there’s no manpower, the infrastructure and labs need to be upgraded. The system is still evolving.”
Establishing a credible regulator is key for India to attract investment into food processing as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks to spur a manufacturing boom. The food services market alone was growing at almost 12 percent each year and would be worth $175 billion by 2018, CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets said in a 2013 report.
More than half of India’s 29 states have banned Maggi, according to reports from the Times of India newspaper over the past few days. – Bloomberg