Positive steps in food safety control

Mmegi Editor | Tuesday January 26, 2016 12:04

The intended changes, to the 23-year-old law will include the establishment of a Food Safety Authority and other critical upgrades needed to keep the law in line with changes in food technology. According to reports, government also intends to build at least two food safety laboratories where regular tests will be done on food coming in and going out of the country. Plans are afoot to extend food safety control to the fields, by testing stockfeed  to evaluate how this could affect humans down the line.

The latest news are indeed welcome for consumers wary, for years, of the standard of regulation of the food industry. In an expose last year, Mmegi revealed a chain of food suppliers, local retailers, supermarkets and informal traders who were selling potentially harmful and toxic foodstuffs that had slipped through the cracks of lax food safety protocols in Botswana.Evidence showed that some unscrupulous large retailers were exploiting loopholes in the outdated Food Control Act to import and repackage condemned food products from abroad, thus pushing their profits up.  One supplier in 2014 was nabbed with repackaged food items and drinks, all past their expiry date and destined for some 207 government departments.  These departments, in turn, were either going consume the expired items themselves, or pass them on – through various social welfare programmes – to unsuspecting underprivileged people, children and others.

This incident was just one out of many that are able to slip through the cracks. In the private sector, it is justifiably believed many more such incidents prevail unchecked, due to lax controls, inadequate infrastructure, poor staffing and outdated legislation. Food safety is a critical public health concern, as shown in figures indicating that between 2000 and 2004, at least 675 cases of food poisoning were reported, many of these in public schools and prisons.

The incidents include 200 cases of diarrhoea, fever and vomiting at a day care centre in Palapye in 2002 and 18 cases of hallucination after consumption of contaminated sorghum meal in Bobirwa in 2001. Around the country, products are   moving across the borders and onto shelves, particularly from Asia and South Africa, without being checked for immediate and long-term safety measrures.  We applaud the MoH’s initiative in this regard and call upon lawmakers to provide the necessary support to the revamped Act.

Today’s thought

“Food safety involves everybody

in the food chain.” 

- Mike Johanns