-working closer with Customs could ease the situation
THE Government Analyst, Food and Drugs Department is tasked with ensuring the safety and quality of food, drugs, beverages, cosmetics, medical devices and water by having in place the requisite quality assurance systems.
But the enforcement aspect of the Department’s work, according to Director, Ms. Marilyn Collins, is like a `task impossible’ due to understaffing and under-resourcing.
The Department, Collins said, has seen a recent surge in expired goods on the market, a situation she suspects may be deliberate, because persons are aware of the limitations of her department in the area of enforcement.
Faced with this dilemma, Collins sees a way out by forging a closer working relationship with the Customs and Trade Administration (CTA) to help arrest the problem.
She said that while it is a known fact that the CTA is itself grappling with monitoring cross-border smuggling, it is also common knowledge that some of the problems plaguing her department have to do with some food importers who are registered with the Department.
And those problems, she said, are compounded even further by some importers aiding in the smuggling of items into the country in an effort to evade taxes and duties, an important revenue earner.
Collins said that while it is her and her staff’s desire to have one or more officers posted at each port of entry to work alongside their CTA counterparts, the shortage of manpower is making it impossible.
She used as a fitting example of how the shortage of staff is affecting the Department’s work in the case where an importer going to clear a container of foodstuff may be allowed to get away with murder, so to speak, in the absence of an inspector from her Department on hand, whereby there is no certainty that all of the goods in the container are in conformity with the regulations of her department.
“Take for instance if a container of juices is imported,” she said. “There is no way the Department would grant its approval if the expiry date is say two weeks away; and it is my Department’s belief, due to the amount of expired goods we are seeing on the market, that some importers may be deliberately buying these products at reduced prices.”
With reference to the Department’s intensification of its campaign over the last three months, Collins said: “Every one of the supermarkets had expired products; there is none that we could have given a clean bill of health to say they are complying with the Food and Drugs Act and Regulations. Every one; some more than others.”
Referring to another problem, whereby officers have been finding products without manufacture or ‘best by’ dates, Collins used the opportunity to warn supermarket proprietors and shopkeepers that “any such goods/products will be picked up from the market.” No product, she stressed, should be manufactured and offered for sale without a date mark.
She said, too, that some persons are guilty of deliberately removing the date marks from certain products, canned goods in particular. “They find ingenious ways of removing these marks from products that are also packaged in cartons and foil wrapped,” Collins said. She added that some persons even attempt to insert their own date mark in order to extend the expiry date of the product.
At this point, she reiterated: “If a product is being offered for sale without a date mark, the Food and Drugs Department will remove it from the market place, because the logical conclusion is that the date was deliberately removed.”
Noting that some products that are imported with a closed date-mark in a coded form, Collins said in such cases, the onus is on the importers to work with the Department so as to assist in getting the information from the manufacturer in the country of origin and have the information decoded.  The importer will then work with the Department on having the uncoded date inserted on the product.
Collins said what her Department has found is that when the importers are left to do the uncoding and insertion on their own, they add another two or three years.
She further cautioned that the Department has a system of decoding and should officers visit and find products that have been uncoded without their assistance; the department will seek to verify that the information is correct. Should any skullduggery be detected, the products will be removed immediately.