Quality of food products must be assured, says Dixon
PERMANENT Secretary in the Ministry of Commerce, Science and Technology, Dr Jean Dixon, said the quality of Jamaica’s food products must be assured if they are to get fair and competitive access to international markets.
“Consumers also need to have unflinching confidence that our foods are safe and of the best quality, whether from our markets, restaurants, grocery stores or in our institutions,” she said.
Dixon was speaking recently at the opening of a four-day seminar, entitled: ‘Food Safety in International Trade.’
She said that the issue of food safety had become topical and strongly emotive, fuelled by heightened consumer awareness about genetically modified organisms and the impact of pesticides and contaminants on health, as well as socio economic considerations surrounding the production of food and food products.
Dixon noted also that in the global market, with increased trade between developed and developing countries, issues of food safety and quality have taken on a renewed prominence.
She pointed to the recent food scare in Europe and other parts of the world, which had resulted in many of Jamaica’s trading partners tightening their food safety systems, as a case in point. The permanent secretary said the systems would become barriers to trade for countries such as Jamaica, “if we fail to take appropriate action to ensure that our food exports can successfully hurdle these barriers”.
In many developing countries, such as Jamaica, a major cause of child mortality was unsafe food caused by poor sanitation and lack of clean water, Dixon said, adding that diarrhoea had been reported as the second leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the Caribbean, including Jamaica, especially in children five years and under.
Noting the importance of food safety for the tourist industry, she informed that Travellers’ Disease (a diarrhoeal disease), has been reported as the most frequent condition affecting travellers from industrialised to tropical and subtropical countries.
Citing the World Trade Organisation/Technical Barriers to Trade and the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreements, she noted that, by themselves, “the agreements do not provide the complete picture related to the requirements, which food producers have to fulfill.”
Dixon explained that new trends in the world related to food safety and quality, now require that foods are produced where the production chain is well defined and where transparent requirements are enforced, to ensure that the food chain was not contaminated.
“In other words, international regulations now affect the entire food chain, from farm to fork,” she stressed.