Raising awareness of the importance of food safety as a routinised aspect of our food consumption culture will, in the period ahead, become increasingly critical to the general well-being of Guyana and will, “more and more” become a yardstick with which to measure our development, Government Analyst-Food & Drugs Department (GA-FDD) Director, Dr Marlan Cole has told the Stabroek Business.
In an invited comment on the significance of the second anniversary of the World Health Organization (WHO)-designated World Food Safety Day (WFSD), celebrated on Sunday June 7, Cole told the Stabroek Business that the fact that the WHO, as of 2019, had created a designated World Food Safety Day “points to a concern on the agency’s part that food safety considerations had become as important to human welfare as being able to get enough to eat. The global discourse about food security no longer revolves solely around access to food but also around the quality of the food we consume. Food safety has become one of key yardsticks used to measure the health of a nation,” Cole explained.
The second WFSD was held “to draw attention and inspire action to help prevent, detect and manage food-borne risks” and to contribute to “food security, human health, economic prosperity, agriculture, market access, tourism and sustainable development,” a WHO release said.
Diarrhoeal diseases are the most common illnesses resulting from the consumption of contaminated foods, causing 550 million people to fall ill and 230,000 deaths every year.
Cole told Stabroek Business that World Food Safety Day was being celebrated “to underline the nexus between food safety, nutrition and food security. All of these are inextricably linked,” he said.
“While Guyana has every right to be the regional leader in food production we still need to ask ourselves where we rank insofar as food safety is concerned. We have to look at our farming practices, the harvesting and marketing of foods, particularly greens and vegetables and how we cook them. The killing, storage and preparation of meat are all attended by regulations and sometimes we are not sure that the rules relating to the killing of animals and preparation of meat adhere to the laid down protocols.”
But according to Cole, food safety goes “way beyond farm practices and food preparation…We at the Food & Drugs Department continue to be concerned about the absence of toilets and washrooms in eating houses and about the fact that they are put under no real pressure to remedy these anomalies,” Cole lamented.
The GA-FDD head told Stabroek Business that insofar as food safety was concerned, there were “several levels” at which the issue needed to be addressed. He said that developing countries, including Guyana, were facing challenges that derive from the global multi-billion dollar trade in expired foods “Controlling this trade depends on collaboration between specialised agencies in the various countries as well as the effective monitoring at the various ports of entry. There is evidence that those systems have to be tightened up and rendered more efficient in order to try to keep out imported foods that can be harmful to human health.”
And according to Cole, Guyana also needs to be concerned about the local food service culture as “a critical aspect” of its wider concern over issues relating to food safety. “There are concerns that have to do with food preparation and food handling in our restaurants, for example, which, over the years, we have not been able to bring under control. There have also been concerns expressed not only here in Guyana but worldwide about standards as far as food service delivery by roadside vendors is concerned. That is an area in which the GA-FDD has done some work but the available evidence suggests that there is still work to be done. I think there is a great deal that customers themselves can do to demand higher food service standards of restaurants and roadside food vendors. The point is that if they want to remain in business they have to raise their game,” Cole said.
