For some time now Director of the Government Analyst Food & Drugs Department Ms. Marilyn Collins has been issuing periodic public warnings about the weaknesses in our national systems for effective monitoring of adherence to safety and health standards by importers of foods and drugs. Each time that the matter is raised with her she restates her concern that the pace of change in the direction of improving those systems is ponderous, to say the least.
In recent weeks Stabroek Business has again had reason to speak both with Ms. Collins and with some distributors of various brands of imported food and drinks about whether or not there has been any qualitative improvement in the situation relating to the monitoring of food and drug imports.
One gets the impression that Ms. Collins is both a consummate professional and an enduring optimist who is averse to painting an apocalyptic picture of the situation. What is equally clear, however, is that not even Ms. Collins’ natural inclination for looking on the brighter side can conceal the fact that there continues to be huge mountains to climb in the quest to render the food and drugs testing and inspection systems even reasonably reliable.
We learnt recently, for example, that around 20 per cent of local food importers are not even registered with the Food and Drugs Department. What this means in effect is that there are huge consignments of imported goods that enter Guyana and go directly to the wholesale and retail markets without being subjected to even the most basic scientific testing to determine whether or not there are any health risks associated with their consumption.
All this is occurring at a time when some local distributors concede that some of their counterparts are party to a thriving trade in expired food imports, facilitated, we are told, by unscrupulous operators in Miami. Additionally, there are the increasing volumes of illegal imports across the country’s borders which. of course, fall entirely outside the purview of the Food and Drugs Department.
And as if that were not enough we are told by the Director of the Food and Drugs Department that even some of the 80 per cent or so of the importers who are registered with the Food and Drugs Department have been known to smuggle foods into the country, not so much to evade the safety and health tests and inspections but in order to evade the taxes imposed by the Customs and Trade Administration.
The primary problem at least as far as legitimate imports are concerned is that the Food and Drugs Department appears to have neither the clout or the capacity to execute its mandate effectively. Though Ms. Collins is loathe to admit it the simple fact is that some importers are altogether dismissive of the Department’s role and, by extension, of the possible consequences for consumers that inhere in their attitude.
What Ms. Collins admits however, is that the bigger problem lies in the protracted failure of her department to secure the necessary cooperation of the Customs and Trade Administration which is of course well placed well equipped to support the Food and Drugs Department in its efforts to monitor food and drug imports. Customs has reportedly argued that the delays in the discharge of consignments that could arise if it seeks to support the Food and Drugs Dept in its inspection process could run it into legal problems with consignees since the regulations dictate that imported goods be discharged within a particular time frame. This, of course, is hardly an adequate excuse since it appears that such a hurdle can be crossed with relative ease providing the will is there to cross that hurdle; and at any rate once goods are deemed to require the proper health and safety checks there will be inevitable delays before they are released to the consignee anyway.
But the problem does not end there. While the proper procedure surely ought to be that importers seek the clearance of the Food and Drugs Department before importing any foods into Guyana, the law does not compel them to do so and it appears that the Ministry of Health has only recently been seeking to put in place legislation to ensure that this loophole is dealt with.
Ms. Collins has told Stabroek Business that there may have been a recent breakthrough in the relationship between the Food and Drugs Department and the Customs and Trade Administration. She believes that there may have been a quantum shift in the position of Customs and that there is now a greater likelihood that the two agencies will be able to work together.
Of course, there is no telling how long it will take for these new mechanisms to be put in place and while we await the bureaucratic changes increasingly large quantities of imported foods, including expired and smuggled foods – are being imported into the country and the truth is that in the absence of even nearly reliable monitoring mechanisms we have no clue whatsoever as to the extent of the problem and the scale of the damage that is being inflicted on the nation’s health.
