THE QUALITY of Jamaica's food products must be assured, if they are to get fair and competitive access to international markets, according to Dr. Jean Dixon, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Commerce, Science and Technology.
"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.
Dr. Dixon was speaking on behalf of Minister, Phillip Paulwell, at the opening of a four-day seminar last Thursday entitled 'Food Safety in International Trade', being held at the Jamaica Conference Centre downtown Kingston.
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.
Dr. Dixon noted that in the global market of today, 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. 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, Dr. 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 industrailised 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 fulfil".
Dr. 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 said.
The seminar, which falls under the National Quality Infrastructure Project, seeks to upgrade the national quality infrastructure of the food sector, such as the mechanisms needed to perform conformity assessments. These mechanisms cover activities ranging from the establishment of the rules of the markets, to the activities used to prove that individual products and services fulfil the requirements set out in the rules.
Dr. Dixon said that upgrading of the quality of infrastructure of the food sector would involve activities such as the development of laws in the areas of food and foodstuff, the upgrading of enforcement mechanisms, training of inspectors and other members of the food industry.
