Financial Times

500 tea factories not compliant with new EU food safety rules
The Sri Lanka Tea Board has said a "staggering" 500 factories are yet to begin work on upgrading their production processes to comply with new European Union food safety rules that come into effect this week -- on January 1.
Only 11 factories are HACCP certified and another 20 are expected to be ready by the end of 2005, it said in a report.

Another 85 factories began work recently on upgrading their standards, but will not meet the January 1 deadline and instead are expected to be compliant by the latter half of 2006.

The new EU food hygiene legislation includes provision for the application of HACCP-based procedures throughout the food production chain. HACCP (pronounced hassip) stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, and focuses on preventing hazards that could cause food-borne illnesses by applying science-based controls, from raw material to finished products.

Traditionally, industry and regulators have depended on spot-checks of manufacturing conditions and random sampling of final products to ensure safe food. This approach, however, tends to be reactive, rather than preventive, and can be less efficient than the proposed new system. The EU is expected to be flexible on the deadline and not immediately shut out teas that are not complaint as the government and Ceylon tea industry had been lobbying for an extension of the timeframe, along with other major tea exporting nations.
Other big producer countries too face similar delays in getting their factories compliant.

Although the EU is not a big market, with only 10 percent of Ceylon tea exports shipped to European countries, the industry is concerned that Ceylon teas could be shut out.

A bigger worry is that larger markets such as the Russian Federation and Middle East/Gulf countries which import 20 percent and 50 percent of Sri Lanka's total tea exports, respectively, could adopt similar food hygiene standards.

The EU in 2003 decreed that all food products that come in to the EU markets should be HACCP compliant. That rule is now in force having come into effect on January 1 this year. The same EU rule said that suppliers from overseas to EU importers, of food products that eventually end up on the shelves of retailers in European markets, should also be HACCP compliant from January 1, 2006.

This means tea suppliers will have to fall in line. There was a good response from company-owned and privately-held tea factories to upgrade their factories when the EU rules were announced.

But many have fallen behind schedule because of soaring energy and wage costs and new taxes that have raised production costs. This reduces funds available for investing in costly upgrades.

Industry officials said that producers need support to comply with the new rules as the estates and factories have had to grapple with energy costs as well as other cost increases that had not been anticipated, making it difficult for them to allocate funds for the factory upgrades.

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