Latest update April 26th, 2024 12:59 AM
May 01, 2017 News
– Food and Drug Department Director
By Rehana Ahamad
Unscrupulous importers continue to bring fake food items and other products into this country, because Guyana lacks the resources to test these potentially harmful products.
This was the indication given by Marlan Cole, Director of the Government Analyst-Food and Drug Department (GA-FDD).
In an interview with this newspaper, Cole explained that authorities are not yet capable of testing imported products to ensure that what is inside, matches what the packaging says.
That means that products believed to be canned corn beef, can very well enter the local market loaded with horse meat, and nobody would know.
The Food and Drug Department does have inspectors who are usually deployed at wharfs across the country, but more often than not, they are simply tasked with examining the labels of these imported products.
Cole gave an example using those filled evaporated milk products that were once barred from entering the country.
“Let’s say the tin says ‘filled evaporated milk’. Those are adulterated, because it contains vegetable fat instead of milk fat, so it would not be allowed in the country. What can happen, is that persons can change the label to just evaporated milk, and then we would not be able to stop the importation, because we don’t really have the capacity to actually test to see if it’s the same ‘filled’ milk or not,” Cole said.
Increased importation of food products means that Guyanese are more exposed to consuming the unknown. Recognizing the dangers of this, Cole said efforts have begun to build capacity, so as to enable scientific testing of suspicious foods entering Guyana.
“We are also working on resuscitating some of the equipment that we have at the Food and Drug Department,” Cole noted.
He specified that several hundreds of containers loaded with food products come into Guyana each week.
At one point, local shops and supermarkets were bombarded by a host of fake canned foods. This is because authorities were not enforcing the requirements on a number of the imported products, allowing fake foods to slip right down the throats of the unsuspecting populace.
Cole said that ever since he took charge of the department, scrutiny of imported foods has been heightened.
With Guyana rapidly losing its ability to be self-sufficient, more and more foreign products are dominating the local market.
A synonym of the word ‘foreign’ is ‘unfamiliar’, and unfamiliarity exposes one to threats.
It has been confirmed that the majority of fake foods coming into Guyana, are imported from the Asian region, with China leading the list. Approximately 30 percent of Guyana’s imported foods come from the continent of Asia.
“Many fake products also come from countries in the Middle East,” Cole said.
The existence of imported fake foods should not be seen as confined to Guyana. In fact, ‘Food Fraud’ is broad term under which the international community is looking to tackle this issue.
Nonetheless, Cole said that the Food and Drug Department has made much strides over the past few years, having recorded success in unearthing a number of inferior products entering the market.
One would recall as early as last March when the department prevented a fake brand of canned tuna from infiltrating the local market.
GAFDD had said in a statement on March 21 last, that it collaborated with the Customs and Trade Administration (CTA) to halt entry of some 2000 cartons 48 x 170g of Tuna imported from China.
According to the department, the ‘bogus’ product was plastered with the label “Buiwick” as opposed to the very popular “Brunswick” brand.
The manufacturer’s address on both the products was the same, but the country of origin was not stated for the fake brand.
This made the ‘Buiwick’ product “false, misleading and deceptive,” under the Guyana’s Food and Drug Act, Chapter 34:03 part (ii) section (6).
Also in March, Guyana began intense scrutiny of meat products coming into the country, from neighbouring Brazil.
Two companies out of that country were accused of exporting spoiled meat, which were mainly processed into different types of sausages.
Brazil, the world’s biggest red meat and poultry exporter, exported tainted meat to a number of major countries, including China, Chile and Egypt. These countries had even imposed a total ban on all meat products from Brazil. This was however, lifted on March 25, 2017, and became restricted to only companies that were under investigation.
Meanwhile, there was also the issue of fake Aji-No-Moto entering Guyana last June. The colour of the package was slightly different, and the product, which was deemed bad for health, was being sold cheaper than the original Japanese product.
The Department of the Government Analyst had seized and removed the counterfeited Ajinomoto from several stalls and supermarkets in the lower East Coast area.
“Using the counterfeited Ajinomoto can therefore result in excessive salt (sodium) intake by consumers since more Ajinomoto would be added in food than normal to reach the required level of aroma and / or taste. This is of public health significance since excessive salt (sodium) intake is a contributing factor in the epidemic of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) in our society that results in obesity, hypertension and congestive heart failure,” the department had said at the time.
Cole had warned at the time that persons caught selling fake or substandard products could be charged and placed before the courts.
Guyana could’ve only confirmed the legitimacy of the product, after tests were conducted in both neighbouring Brazil and Japan. The results showed that the original product is 99.90% pure, while the counterfeited product was only 91.63% pure.
Given Guyana’s current inability to conduct these vital tests, Cole is advising consumers to be extra careful.
“Persons need to ensure that they inspect the labels of the items they are buying,” Cole said.
The most common things to check for would include expiration dates, the ingredients, the net, or the weight of the product, as well as the name and location of the manufacturing company.
“People need to ensure that the details of the manufacturer are clearly outlined on the label – the address and so on. They should also guard against products that seem suspiciously cheaper than the same things bearing other brands,” Cole added.
He is urging persons to stick to the brands they know, and stay away from buying products that do not have words in English on the package.
Meanwhile, the existence of smuggling of food products into the country is also a major challenge that continues. Cole specified however, that not all the products being smuggled into the country are fake.
“You would find that sometimes people just do not want to have the system take its course,” he said.
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