This newspaper has learnt that the anticipated increased demand for snack foods and drinks ahead of the start of the new school year may have precipitated the appearance on the market of quantities of expired and near-expired products, which, under the national and municipal food safety regulations, ought correctly to be removed from circulation and destroyed. The sale of these items is in the open and some of the distribution entities are well-known.
There are several reasons why the practice persists. First, it is accommodated by consumers who choose to take advantage of the “good deals,” that is, the reduced prices at which these expired products are offered. There are parents who buy these products and feed them to their children. Secondly, there is the serious deficit in public food safety education. Some consumers, we are told, do not even know where to look for expiry dates on packages, cans and bottles. Then there is the greed and insensitivity of those who offer these expired snack foods for sale, altogether uncaring of the possible harm that they do to those who consume what they offer, mostly children. Finally, there is the patent and altogether unacceptable inability of either the Food Safety Department of the Georgetown Municipality or the Food and Drug Analyst Department of the Ministry of Health to curb what is both a possible health hazard and an illegal practice. This, despite the fact, that the respective Heads of these agencies have repeatedly and publicly bemoaned their deficiencies and pled with their respective controlling agencies – the Georgetown City Council and the Ministry of Health, respectively – to change the situation.
In the course of speaking with various individuals and agencies about the problem of expired snack foods that remain on the market one distributor told us that the under-resourcing of the two agencies responsible for the administration of food safety has to be seen as a reflection of how little importance their controlling agencies really attach to food safety. The distributor told us that his own engagements with the food safety authorities had everything to do with his own voluntary compliance with the law rather than any strictness on the part of the competent authorities in enforcing the law. There is, he says, only one word to describe the prevailing food safety enforcement regime… “laughable.”
If the respective enforcement agencies are bound to frown on this disdainful dismissal of their efforts, both concede the truth of their considerable weaknesses. The Food and Drug Department, for example, has been unable to arrive at an arrangement through which it can either effectively police food and drug imports at the various ports of entry or come to an effective understanding with the Customs and Trade Administration with regard to a collaborative effort to ensure the safety of those imports. In conceding the weaknesses of the Department the Director has told this newspaper in the past that its effectiveness relies as much – if not more – on voluntary compliance with the law and the preparedness of consumers to report infractions as it does on the Department’s ability to enforce regulations and detect and punish transgressions. As for the Food Safety Department, setting aside the fact that its own controlling agency is currently in a state of considerable turmoil, its five officers are responsible for, among other things, policing food safety standards in more than 200 city houses in Georgetown! That, frankly, says it all.
Part of the responsibility of both agencies is for public education which, presumably, includes mounting public awareness campaigns initiatives designed to ensure that the public is kept abreast of critical food safety issues. One would have thought that the start of a new school year ought to have been an entirely appropriate time for such an awareness campaign to be mounted to target children, returning to school, parents, schools and vendors, in effect, to remind them of the various regulations governing food safety. At least as far as we are aware, neither agency has plans for any such initiatives not because they may not consider it necessary but because they do not have the resources to mount such exercises thoroughly and effectively. In the case of the Food and Drug Department which, incidentally, has been helpful in providing this newspaper with information in the past when we sought to provide it with an opportunity to make a public comment on an important food safety issue – the selling of expired snacks and drinks for consumption by schoolchildren – we were told that the Ministry of Health had said no to our request.
It really ought to be a matter of acute concern to the authorities that even as we immerse ourselves in public discourse and law-making on matters pertaining to the welfare of our nation’s children, we continue to blatantly overlook, or at least to significantly undervalue, the importance of an issue that may well have a critical bearing on their long-term health.