Even as the growth of the economy continues to depend in various ways on the success of the local food industry, former director of the Food and Drug Analyst Department Marilyn Collins believes that public attitudes and, perhaps more importantly, official policy towards issues of food safety need to keep pace with the growing importance of the food sector.
Collins makes several key points to support her contention.
First, she asserts that increasingly stringent safety and health-related regulations governing the importation of foods into countries that represent Guyana’s most important markets will, sooner rather than later, compel producers to toe an increasingly demanding line. Second, she makes the point that serious efforts to grow the tourism industry—and simultaneously raise the profile of local cuisine—can only proceed successfully against the backdrop of constant attention to issues of hygiene and food safety.
Third, she points to the surfeit of local restaurants and snackettes that have coincided with the enthusiasm for eating out. Here too, the business community has an enhanced responsibility to raise standards of sanitation and hygiene.
She is not despairing, but Collins is not entirely at ease. It is, she says, government that has the primary responsibility for protecting the citizenry against food-borne diseases. By that she means that it is government that must fashion the laws and regulations and create and manage the regulatory institutions and ensure that those are effectively enforced.
Still, she contends, such regulations and watchdog institutions as are put in place do not excuse farmers, manufacturers, restaurant proprietors and attendants and exporters from setting their own standards. Creating a secure national food safety regime is not a task that can be left to the authorities alone.
She advocates reform of the national food safety regime as a priority health concern. Most of all, she believes the science of food safety is important. Science, she says, has to do with, among other things, being able to assess risk, hence the importance of well-equipped and functioning laboratories.
Providing assurances on the good health of plants, animals and humans is one of the cornerstones of health and safety in the food industry. “It is important that we are aware of the risks associated with our foods. Ideally, samples of our foods, meats and vegetables, for example, should be traceable to their sources, to the farms. Traceability is not particularly difficult. We have had support in this area from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) among others. Why has it not worked? I suggest a lack of will,” Collins says.
After several years as head of the Food and Drug Analyst Department she has long cultivated an intimate understanding of the nature of the problems afflicting the food safety sector. Some of it, she believes, is structural. While different aspects of food safety policy and execution are located inside three separate state institutions—the ministries of Health, Agriculture and Trade—there is no reliable mechanism that connects the work of the three entities. Collins says that the success of her own efforts to work with these entities has had to do with her personal style. “There is no overarching body. For years there has been talk about a single body for dealing with food safety. There is a great need to bring all of the players together.”
Food safety policy, Collins says, ought correctly to be driven by what citizens want. That, she says, is clearly not the case. “It is true that consumer concerns should really be driving the passage of food safety legislation and the enforcement of regulations though I believe that what will ultimately push our local food safety policy are the international pressures that will ultimately bring pressure to bear on us.”
To make her point she draws attention to what she believes are the mounting pressures that will be brought to bear in European and North American markets where food safety regulations could well undermine, perhaps even erode entirely Guyana’s high-value export markets. The US Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) is an example of a potential threat to the local food export market though, Collins says, that threat might not be imminent.
At the local level, standards can easily be sacrificed on the altar of business expediency.
The profusion of eating houses that have sprung up across the country in recent years poses a greater responsibility on business houses to undertake and sustain food safety training. It is at times like these, she says, that you need to go back to basics: like washing hands; being mindful of the correct temperatures for the storage of foods; separating cooked foods from raw foods; creating sanitizing stations and always employing the correct food-handling tools.
Some of the entities in the food service sector, she concedes, have their own challenges. Most of which have to do with resource constraints and that can also be a real danger. Whatever their constraints, vendors who provide consumers with food must build into their service a particular mindfulness of food safety.
She does not excuse roadside food vendors. While she acknowledges the tradition and concedes that the fare can be cheap yet nutritious, she believes that they too have a responsibility to educate themselves in food safety if they want to provide a sensitive public service.
There is, Collins says, a need to be mindful of the multi-faceted nature of food safety as a national priority. Locally, food safety has become both an economic and a public health issue. On both counts, we cannot afford to ignore it, she says.
