The disclosure by the Government Analyst Food and Drugs Department that retailers are mixing flour with powdered milk and offering the mixture for sale as pure powdered milk is one of those shameful and infuriating manifestations of a thoroughly corrupt commercial culture that has long been an occupational hazard of shopping in Guyana.
Some businesses have concocted a litany of devious schemes designed to maximize their own profits while ruthlessly ‘gouging’ consumers in an economy where the cost of living continues to soar beyond the reach of ordinary Guyanese.
The milk/flour mixture is a particularly cruel and odious scam since, apart from the fact that it seeks to exploit the poorest of the poor, it also ‘targets’ children of poor families that cannot afford the more costly ‘brand name’ milk available on the local market.
The other real danger of course is that part of the mixture includes flour that may well be heavily contaminated since, with the recent liberalization of flour imports, the commodity is imported into the country both legally and illegally and under conditions which, in some cases, are almost certainly hygienically questionable.
Since few people appear to have troubled themselves to report this dastardly practice to the Government Analyst Food and Drug Department, we really have no idea how widespread the practice is and there is a hollow ring to the threat made by the department to prosecute delinquent sellers since the department has admitted that in the absence of labelling there is simply no way of identifying the offenders.
The whole affair places us on the horns of yet another consumer dilemma for which there appears to be no ready solution. The Food and Drugs Department, in its understaffed state, simply cannot police the entire commercial sector to ensure compliance with the law while the Department’s Director, Ms Marilyn Collins, is understandably reluctant to go down the road of widespread seizures since that approach has, in the past, given rise to its own problems, including indiscriminate seizures and attendant corrupt practices.
What Ms Collins appears to prefer is the approach of seeking to persuade sellers to package and label the milk prior to offering it for sale. That too has its problems, the most obvious of which are the further health risks associated with the possibility of packaging under insanitary conditions. The other problem, of course, is that the sellers who are ‘bumping up’ their profits by mixing the milk with flour really have no incentive to cooperate with Ms Collins and her department.
For the time being, at least, it appears that we are destined to live with yet another shenanigan by unscrupulous traders who, frankly, in other societies where consumer protection is treated as a higher priority, would be behind bars where they rightly belong.