Editorial
Food and drink: State must ensure quality
View(s):The imported milk food crisis that is playing all over the media these days has now been elevated to a cabinet-level committee with doctors, dieticians, nutritionists, sports medicine specialists, public health inspectors, milk producers, exporters and importers, Health Ministry officials, GMOA frontliners all in the fray.
The bottom line seems to be that one of the world’s largest milk producers in experimenting with a new fertiliser product used for the pastures that feed the cows, triggered an extraneous chemical in its final product — milk.
From all accounts, the New Zealand company lacked uberimma fides or utmost good faith in alerting its worldwide clientele of its early findings of the chemical. There is evidence to show that it tried to put a lid on the incident to cover up a major blunder until it could not be hidden any more.
More or less simultaneously in Sri Lanka, came the even more horrifying news that certain dairy products contained traces of a bacterial strain producing a deadly toxin ‘Butulin’ through a dairy by-product called ‘whey protein concentrate’ that is essentially consumed used in products consumed by infants.
The net result in this debate is a closer look at the production and import of milk, the consumption thereof, food control measures, and the import inspections schemes in place. (The Business Times section has an interesting and more detailed leader on page 2 on the subject, especially about the new theory by some that milk is not a vital nutrient supplement).
The local dairy industry began in earnest with the National Milk Board back in the 1960s. It produced high quality milk products to schools and milk bars were popular sales points throughout the country. Alas, the pricing policy was set by a politically run Treasury not by market forces. Milk collected in Anuradhapura farms, for instance, was transported by trains that could not keep to time schedules, and it usually arrived spoilt to the factory in Narahenpita in Colombo. The local cows were too emaciated to produce the required volume of milk.
Today’s local industry in private hands is more vibrant and advanced, but lack of milk producing cows, capital and machinery has retarded its growth. Consumer preference has changed over the year and if the State is serious about cutting its import bill on milk products it must provide concessions for the local industry to expand cold storage facilities and spray-dried milk production. State patronage in this area is minimal and therefore requires further investment.
So too is the inadequacy in the field of technology to inspect both, local and foreign food products, not only of milk foods, but of all imports. In today’s globalised world we even import dried sprats from Dubai and food stuffs with preservatives that extend the shelf life of various foodstuffs. In advanced Europe they discovered horse meat sold as beef only after some months. Modern lifestyles have seen an increase in the consumption of canned foods and drinks and the preparation of them is critical.
The new Minister of Technology and Research has given a fresh impetus to the quality testing of these products through the ITI and the SLSI, but their credibility must be unimpeachable. So too, the MRI. Another area that requires attention is the drafting of laws (regulations) under the Food Act No. 26 of 1980. Complaints are aplenty at the lackadaisical pace at which the Legal Draftsman’s Department sets about preparing regulations from the drafts the Health Ministry sends them.
Often, the ‘draftsperson’ is on maternity leave or the file is misplaced. Penalties under the law are not deterrents to offenders. In China, those who contaminated milk foods were either executed or given life sentences. One does not advocate such severe punishments here, but a more active State role is required to protect public health in the food we eat and the beverages we drink.
India’s double speak
India, the wanna-be super-power, celebrated its 67th Independence Day this week with the usual pomp, pageantry and rhetoric slamming its arch-rival, Pakistan. Not to be outdone, Pakistan did the same with pot-shots on India as fighting raged on their border.
Ever since the colonial British drawn plans of partition in 1947, India and Pakistan have gone to war with each other and had an uneasy relationship, to put it mildly.
The sour relations are so entrenched in their respective psyche – and their domestic politics that national pride comes into play, and is used cunningly at election time. On-and-off attempts at reconciliation have come a cropper by spoilers with vested interests. They derail fledgling peace processes fearing their own petty empires of power and influence will collapse if any rapprochement is to be realised at normalising relations.
The vexed issue of Kashmir is at the root of this bad blood that is more than a generation old and no Government, either in New Delhi or Islamabad has been able to resolve the problem. That, however, is a commentary by itself.
What is of concern to the south of India, in Sri Lanka is the continuing harassment at a political and diplomatic level. Last week, the powers-that-be in India thought it fit to summon Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner in New Delhi and issue him with a ‘demarche’ (a diplomatic protest note, or warning letter) with regard to the arrest of more than a hundred southern Indian fishermen now in Sri Lankan custody for poaching in Sri Lanka’s territorial waters.
The Government of India (GoI) wanted these fishermen released pronto. It was indeed a pleasant surprise that the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) stood up to this thoroughly unreasonable move and rejected the demarche instead of caving into what was clearly a case of bullying. That the GoSL has at last wised up to what is happening night-in and night-out in the waters around the Palk Strait that divides the two South Asian neighbours is commendable.
For too long has the Sri Lankan side had to pussyfoot the issue of hundreds of South Indian fishermen flagrantly violating the territorial integrity of another country with the active encouragement of the state Government of Tamil Nadu and the tacit connivance of the Central GoI.
That this is an emotive issue; and election issue in Tamil Nadu and that it gets caught up in the compulsions of the coalition electoral politics of India cannot cut ice when India itself complains of the compulsions in Pakistan over cross-border incursions in the north of India. Little does India realise that it itself has encouraged cross borders incursions vis-à-vis Sri Lanka — with separatist guerrillas in the 1980s and now with the poaching fishermen.What it preaches in the north must surely be practised in the south.
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