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safety protocols in Botswana.Evidence showed that some unscrupulous large retailers were exploiting loopholes in the outdated Food Control Act to import and repackage condemned food products from abroad, thus pushing their profits up.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.
