WITH much of its work for 2020 curtailed due to restrictions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Guyana Analyst Food and Drug Department (GA-FDD) is looking to hit the ground running for 2021 when it begins its inspection and licensing of manufacturers across the country.
Falling under the purview of the Ministry of Health, the GA-FDD is responsible for addressing safety and trade-related issues for food, drugs, cosmetics and medical devices, ensuring that items are safe and pass quality checks to enter regional and international markets.
The department is responsible for overseeing such products that are manufactured in Guyana, as well as those that are imported into the country. The manufacturers and importers are required to be registered with the GA-FDD in order to be issued a licence to operate; they are required to renew the licence annually.
However, as with many organisations when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Guyana in March 2020, measures implemented to curb the spread of the virus, affected the ability of the department to carry out its functions.

“We were restricted last year because of limitations in movement, but now with the imminent arrival of the vaccine we started to plan our inspection activities. It affected the inspection and training aspects of the FDD. We were unable to go out and do a lot of inspections, such as the certification of food-storage bonds or manufacturing entities. So most of those licences from last year have been rolled over to this year,” explained Marlan Cole, the GA-FDD Director.
He added: “However, we would be embarking on an aggressive inspection and certification exercise to ensure that we complete our quota for the year, because some exporting countries are requesting updated documentation. If you can’t do physical inspections, they are telling us that it can also be done virtually.”
Cole noted that notwithstanding the department’s restrictions brought on by COVID-19, the pandemic had brought with it a need for the department to be even more vigilant in some respects.
“Even though we were not frontline workers, we were doing work that was very key and critical and significant; we still had a lot to do relative to coronavirus. The department, overall, was restricted in our work; however, we had to up the ante in terms of insulating consumers against substandard face masks and sanitisers, cleaning agents and illegal imports of rapid based testing kits,” Cole noted.

One of the measures advised to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus was the use of alcohol-based hand sanitisers with alcohol content of 60 per cent or more, creating an immediate and massive demand for these products.
There was also a similar, massive demand for face masks, Lysol products and other antibacterial cleaning agents. Cole shared that the department had a vital role to play during the pandemic in ensuring that sanitisers and other products that were both imported and manufactured, met the standards that they advertised.
“Coronavirus has allowed the department to be responsive. All the hand sanitisers and alcohol-based sanitising agents had to be certified, tested and approved by the department,” he explained.
“We had several coming out, Foam, a sanitiser from Sterling and Environ, an alcohol-based sanitiser from DDL that had to be approved by the department and all the imports coming in relative to sanitising and cleaning agents had to be subjected to the department’s oversight. In addition, there were the face masks, we had to determine and ensure that those labelled as N95 were actually N95, which would have been categorised as medical devices,” he further related.