VOL 20 NO 157 REGD NO DA 1589 | Dhaka, Tuesday, July 02 2013

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High Court order on food safety: Where are food courts?

Ensuring food safety requires collaboration, coordination and exchange of information among all the stakeholders, writes M S Siddiqui
Protecting human health in today's global food market is an important challenge and one which must be addressed through internationally recognised food safety systems. The High Court of Bangladesh in a case, ref: 60, 55 DLR, 2003, instructed the government to establish food courts throughout the country to ensure safe food for the citizens. The government is yet to fully comply with the court order. Food is the major source of human exposure to pathogenic agents, both chemical and biological (viruses, parasites, bacteria). The importance of food safety lies in the fact that food is the primary mode of transmission of infectious disease. The Statistical Yearbook of Bangladesh 2010 revealed that the cause of death are due to: 23 per cent (food-borne illness): liver diseases, jaundice, diarrhea, dysentery, TB, peptic ulcer, malnutrition, skin diseases, leprosy, arsenic, kidney, appendicitis, worm and other; 22 per cent (indirect food and related): heart disease, stroke, blood pressure, diabetes, paralysis, tumor, cancer; 10 per cent infectious diseases): chicken pox, measles, polio, fever, malaria, typhoid, influenza, diphtheria, meningitis, tetanus, gonorrhea, HIV; 18 per cent (asthma and related): asthma, respiratory diseases, rheumatic fever, rheumatism, ENT diseases; 10 per cent (accident and related): suicide, murder, burn, snakebite, poisoning, drowning, rabies, mental diseases, drug abuse, epilepsy, pregnancy and abortion problem; and the rest 17 per cent due to old age. The impacts of food-borne casualties have impact on economy. Food-borne diseases create an enormous burden on the economy. Consumer costs include medical, legal, and other expenses, as well as absenteeism at work and school. For many consumers who live at a subsistence level, the loss of income due to food-borne illness can perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Chemical, physical, microbiological hazards: The consumers may be deprived of safe food by spoilage in any point from production to delivery to consumers, supply of substandard or fake products, failure to provide production dates, improper or deceitful labeling of food imports, poor product quality and packaging of food exports, expired food, exceeding levels for preservatives/additives, lack of harmonisation of food safety regulations and fraud. Food safety threats in Bangladesh are arsenic in food, genetically modified food, environment pollutants in food, human-induced food adulteration during farm production, industrial production, marketing, and street food vending. Numerous food processors are producing, processing and preparing foodstuffs in serious unhygienic environments. Fruits, fishes and many other things sold in markets that are preserved with formalin, a dangerous chemical liable for various types of cancer. Poisonous Dichloro Diphenyl Trichloroethane (DDT) powder is unrestrainedly used in dry fish, which can cause cancer along with various other reproductive problems. Foods are prepared with various toxic colours that are generally used as textile dyes. Consumption of these toxic textile dyes can cause indigestions,

allergies, asthma, cancer and so on. Besides the above, manufacturers use urea fertiliser commercially to adulterate the moodi (puffed rice). Sick, infected and poisonous dead chickens are used in soup preparation; suppliers and retailers sell date-expired energy drink, biscuits randomly. Metals, such as lead and mercury, cause neurological damage in infants and children. Exposure to cadmium can also cause kidney damage, usually seen in the elderly. Overlapping of laws: There are at present 15 laws to regulate safe food delivery to the consumers. These laws are: 1. Penal Code, 1860 ('PC 1860'), 2. Control of Essential Commodities Act, 1956 ('CECA 1956'), 3. Food (Special Courts) Act, 1956 ('FA 1956'), 4. Pure Food Ordinance, 1959 ('PFO 1959'), 5. Cantonments Pure Food Act, 1966 ('CPFA 1966'), 6. Pesticide Ordinance, 1971 ('PO 1971'), 7. Special Powers Act, 1974 ('SPA 1974'), 8. Fish and Fish Products (Inspection and Control), Ordinance, 1983 ('FFPO 1983'), 9. The Breast-Milk Substitutes (Regulation of Marketing) Ordinance, 1984 ('BMSO 1984'), 10. Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution Ordinance 1985 ('BSTIO 1985'), 11. Iodine Deficiency Disorders Prevention Act 1989 ('IDDPA 1989'), 12. Vokta Odhikar Songrokkhon Ain, 2009 [Consumers Rights Protection Act 2009], 13. Stanio Sarkar (City Corporation) Ain, 2009 [Local Government (City Corporation) Act 2009] , 14. Stanio Sarkar (Paurashava) Ain, 2009 [Local Government (Paurashava) Act, 2009] 15. Mobile Court Ain, 2009 [Mobile Court Act, 2009]. It is important to note that, use of such a large number of laws for a single purpose like food safety is quite unusual. There is overlapping of laws for criminalising some particular offences. Sections 272 and 273 of the PC 1860 make food adulteration an offence. The PFO 1959 also tries the same offence in section 6(1)(a) and prohibits food adulteration in the process of manufacturing. Section 16 of the PFO 1959 proscribes keeping of adulterants in places where food is manufactured. Later in 1974, food adulteration became punishable under Section 25C of the Special Power Act, which is simply considered as the alteration of the language, punishment (in this instance, death penalty) of the parallel provisions of PC 1860. While food adulteration has been criminalised under the aforementioned three laws simultaneously, in 2009, the government enacted the CRPA 2009, where section 41 includes the same offence over again. This multiplicity of laws creates confusion in the mind of manufacturers, processors, retailers or even to the enforcement authorities to realise which law deals with particular food safety issue. Moreover, there is no effective coordination among these regulatory authorities dealing with food safety. Several authorities carry out anti-adulteration drives in Bangladesh. Some drives are conducted by the ministry of commerce (MoC), some are done by the ministry of industry (MoI), and a few are operated by the city corporations (under the ministry of local government). Therefore, food control in Bangladesh is a multi-sectoral responsibility. In Bangladesh, penalties are practised as the way of the execution of the statutes. But no persuasive measures like training, caution notice, improvement notice are involved in the enforcement mechanism. Moreover, the administrative enforcement mechanism of Bangladesh is not organised. It has not designed inspection strategies and there is no clear method of detecting non-compliance with the regulations. It is important for a better enforcement regime to have outlined clear implementation strategies so that all instances of non-compliance can be easily identified and action taken promptly by the proper authority. There are a few food laboratories under various government, autonomous and international organisations in Bangladesh. However very few of these are operating down to the regional and district level. It was observed that only a few of the laboratories are well equipped and well maintained. They have shortages of maintenance budget, inadequate technological resources, manpower and, above all, lack of coordination in procedures/methods of testing. Proposed Food Safety Law: In some countries there two laws for safety of food. One is Food Safety Modernisation Law. This law provides for the making of regulations respecting quality management programmes, quality control

programmes, safety programmes and preventive control plans to be implemented by regulating authority. The other law is Safe Food Law for regulation. The law requires food production facilities to re-register with the regulating authority. Registration is crucial, as products from non-registered facilities will be considered "misbranded," which prohibits their sale. It provides for the making of regulations to provide for improved traceablity of any food commodity. Both laws acknowledge that food safety issues will arise and provide for improved capacity to properly respond and to establish pilot projects in coordination with the food industry to explore ways to quickly and effectively identify people who may have received tainted food in order to mitigate outbreak of food-borne illness. In some countries there is one law for both improvement and regulation. Bangladesh seems going for one law, the proposed Food Safety Act. The draft has many loopholes and shortcomings. It focuses on the activities of businessmen under definition of food business (sub clause 7 & 8). But it ignores the management of all the stakeholders to ensure safe food concept. It proposes to set up a national food security management authority mostly with officials of different ministries and departments without any other stakeholders. Similar laws in other countries have provisions of monitoring, research, quality control, management, prevention, correction, consumer education etc. But the proposed law puts emphasis on punishment of wrong-doers only. Citizens may be well served by prevention of offence rather than punishment of offenders only. The proposed safe food plan should include: l Hazard analysis that identifies and evaluates known or reasonably foreseeable hazards for each type of food manufactured, processed, packed or held at the facility. l Preventive controls which would be required to be identified and implemented to provide assurances that hazards that are likely to occur will be significantly minimised or prevented. * Monitoring of procedures to provide assurance that preventive controls are consistently performed. * Corrective actions that would be used if preventive controls are not properly implemented. * Verification activities to ensure that preventive controls are consistently implemented and are effective. * Record-keeping would be required to keep a written food safety plan, including the hazard analysis. They also would be required to keep records of preventive controls, monitoring, corrective actions, and verification. * Public education should include a general, science-based food safety programme directed toward all consumers and target programmes for those persons at high risk for food-borne illness. Consumer education should also provide information on technological advances, such as irradiation and agriculture biotechnology that can enhance the safety of food supply. Ensuring food safety requires collaboration, coordination and exchange of information among all the stakeholders. The writer is pursuing PhD in Open University, Malaysia. shah@banglachemical.com