A watchdog on food safety

IT has been our consistent call to the government since the unfortunate and dangerous melamine affair surfaced that it must set up a central authority with the specific task of exercising oversight over the quality of food items, imported or produced locally. Our suggestion has been echoed by experts at a seminar in the capital recently.
Handling of the melamine issue has been woefully lacking in many respects. We essentially suffered from the absence of a central testing facility capable of testing the different brands of imported powdered milk. The utter helplessness of the public was compounded by the fact that there was need to test and retest the products there being no one laboratory that could be relied upon totally. Regrettably, the government shrugged off its responsibility in the matter by not putting out the necessary advisory for the public to act upon in the interregnum, till a definitive finding was made available on the brands under question.
This unfortunate and dangerous episode has exposed certain shortcomings of the system dealing with the quality of food. Apart from the fact that there is no one single testing unit, the laboratories that are there are not only short handed, they also suffer from the lack of adequate technical resources and logistic support. Along with the upgrading of the facilities one of these must be assigned the overall responsibility for testing and advising the government. What is often overlooked is that the various stages of monitoring that imported food items should be put through are often circumvented, and the point of containerisation of these items from bulk, for the local markets, is often spared the scrutiny, making adulteration of foreign products very easy. And because of shortage of manpower, the oversight during and after distribution is extremely lax, if not totally absent.
We believe that if the government had so far not realised that these measures required an apex body to coordinate the various steps, it is about time it did so. When there is a drug administration authority in the country why cannot we have one whose job it would be to constantly monitor the market to ensure that all the items of food conform to the prescribed standard laid down by the government?
It is a matter of utmost importance; it can brook no delay since it has to do with the very state of health of the nation. If today's children are fed with contaminated food we will soon have a generation of sick youth. That is a situation the country can ill afford.