Growing global demands, particularly in developed countries, for a greater mindfulness of food safety concerns in their importation policies continue to bring the international food processing industry, particularly in developing countries, under pressure to conform or else, to forfeit lucrative markets, according to a recent report published under the name of the international Pest Control Company RENTOKIL.
The Report titled Global Trends in Food Processing says that increasing vigilance of importing countries arising out of mounting food safety concerns has created “a turbulent period” for the food processing sector.
“There is a significant economic impact of getting food safety wrong if modern food supply chains are incorrectly assessed and risk mitigation is absent”, the RENTOKIL assessment says, adding that even a small impact on a supply chain can have a large economic impact on an industry that is currently valued at “at over (US)$2 trillion dollars globally and consist of over 400,000 businesses.”
The warning about a potentially high price for indifference to being mindful of food safety standards applies as much to Guyana as any other country where it is widely believed that reaching the ever-rising barrier that applies in the United States, for example, requires a level of human and technical resources which are not all yet at the country’s disposal.
The challenge for Guyana is that countries like the United States seem bent on not lowering standards. That seeming refusal to lower the barrier derives from what has been far less than robust monitoring systems.
According to a 2011 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Report an estimated 48 million Americans fell ill and 128,000 had to be hospitalized as a result of food hygiene issues. The cost of this to the US economy, according to the Report was US$77 billion.
Countries’ concerns about food safety have also been accentuated by the fact that food processing is “significantly impacted by multiple external factors, including economic trends, climate change, demographic shifts, emerging power markets, new trade partnerships and world population growth predictions.” Other concerns arise out of the fact that “today’s food supply chain is more globalized, longer and far more complex than ever before” while there are even further risks arising from the fact that “processed foods are dependent on longer supply chains which poses a great challenge to assuring food safety.”
Stricter legally-driven control over the movement of processed foods across borders and into markets in developed countries could impact heavily in some countries where, according to the RENTOKIL Report “the food processing industry is a major contributor to the health of the national economy” adding that apart from being impacted by the local economy where it manufactures, the food processing sector is also impacted by “the global economy in terms of food logistics and imports and exports…Shifts and changes in regional economies, population size, food consumption, and the food and drinks industry in general all have significant implications for food processing,” the report adds.
While figures computed by the European Food and Drink Industry list the USA, EU and China as the global ‘heavy hitters’ in the food processing industry, the emergence of food processing/agro processing as important sectors in the economies of developing countries has meant that market access has become even more important for those countries.
The issue assumes even greater importance in countries like Guyana where agro processing has provided employment and livelihoods for large numbers (possibly quite a few thousands) of otherwise unemployed persons.
For Guyana, the issue of countries’ food safety standards and the implications of those for access to lucrative markets has arisen at a time when the agro-processing sector is beginning to make a more boisterous statement than in the past about its potential and where, finally, modest cracks are opening up in once tightly controlled external (including regional) markets. However, the challenge of meeting international food safety standards continues to be stymied by an inadequate standards monitoring infrastructure, the limitations ranging from a scarcity of human resources and adequate testing facilities to a limited resource allocation to physical infrastructure.
Guyana, like other developing countries has had no choice than to attempt to raise its game in the light of the further monitoring mechanisms put in place by the United States through its 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act. This week, the long-serving Director of the Government Analyst-Food and Drugs Department (GAFDD) Marlan Cole told the Stabroek Business that while the strengthening of the country’s food testing infrastructure continues to be “a work in progress” the worm is beginning to turn. Setting aside the fact that government has announced a multi – million dollar investment plan for the GAFDD, Cole said that there had been improvements in testing capabilities, including human resource capacity in the Department.
Even as developing countries like Guyana seek to respond to their fundamental weaknesses associated with deficiencies linked to food safety-related testing capabilities, other challenges which those countries have not yet begun to tackle have already arisen. Setting aside what it says is “the complexity of modern supply chains as a factor affecting food processing today,” the RENTOKIL report says that in order to “truly assure food safety in today’s world, businesses need to assess levels of risk along the entire supply chain.” It notes that since the increased cost of raw material will impact cost of damages in case of pest infestation, businesses in the food processing sector will come under increasing pressure “to action recommendations to prevent, reduce and control pest infestations…”
