Director of the Food and Drugs Department Marlon Cole may have been short on details regarding what he told this newspaper was the planned creation of a new complex to house his department. However, now that we have been duly informed that after several years the department is to be re-housed from its less than convivial temporary lodgings at the University of Guyana, one would hope that the full details of this development, including the anticipated timing for the full and final completion of the complex, will be made public without further delay.
In the place of the building that used to house the Department now stands the multi-million dollar Marriott Hotel and it is for time for citizens to judge whether the swap was worth the while. What we now know—based on our conversation with Mr Cole—is that after the Kingston operations were discontinued, the department’s laboratory facility was no longer operational. The Food and Drugs Department’s laboratory testing capacity was reduced from 85 per cent to 35 per cent. Again, we are none the wiser regarding the particular testing services that were lost when the department was removed though whatever those services were we got the impression that Mr Cole was saying that they are yet to be restored.
Stabroek Business has been following the fortunes of the Food and Drugs Department for some years now and we know a bit about its chronic shortage of trained staff and its attendant lack of capacity to fully perform its monitoring functions; its lack of proper food and drug inspection facilities at ports of entry and what has been, at times, the reticence of the Customs Department to support the work of the Department.
While we cannot vouch for what happens these days we are also aware that there was a time not so long ago when the verification of those imports which fell within the purview of Food and Drugs could only be effected if importers voluntarily submitted those items for inspection and verification, which of course raises the issue as to how much—in terms of expired and or counterfeit and otherwise illegal items—might have been brought into the country without the requisite permission.
This newspaper’s immediate interest in the Food and Drugs Department has to do with the specific and increasingly important role that it will have to play as a stakeholder in the facilitation of international trade given its testing and certification responsibilities. From all reports we are still far from up to speed in meeting the requirements of the United States’ Food Safety Modernization Act which of course means that our agro processing and other sectors could be at risk of having their products denied entry into the US market. The same, potentially, is true of Canada where a formidable thicket of laws have been enacted to protect consumers from using contaminated and/or sub-standard products. Here again, one should make the point that while it does not appear that food exports from Guyana are being affected by the FSMA at this time the law is already in force but our own agro-processing industry which has been an important part of our food exports sector is unprotected as far as a laboratory testing facility to certify the quality of potential food exports is concerned. Responsibility for this state of affairs rests solely on the shoulders of the Government of Guyana which alone made the decision to dismantle and re-site the Food and Drugs Department from Kingston.
For a host of reasons that are critical to the Guyana economy, it is vital that we be further updated on the proposed Food and Drugs Department Complex and that the facility be set up, staffed and equipped in the shortest possible time.
