Government takes on food contamination with plans for 'product recall' safeguard

Shaken with the rising incidents of adulteration of food products manufactured in India and sold locally and abroad, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) - under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare - is all set to usher in a 'product recall' procedure to ensure food safety in the country. 

Once the procedure is in place, any food product, ranging from tinned products to packaged milk, if found to be counterfeit, adulterated or contaminated, can be seized and recalled at the production stage, retail stores or even from consumers.

If a product is found to be spurious, the entire quantity of the item produced in the 'production batch' period will be recalled. It could be thousands of butter packets belonging to the specific period in question, or lakhs of baby food packets. 

It would also be possible to trace and remove a tainted product at any part of the supply chain. 

In November last year, Tasty Nuts, a variety of spice-coated fried peanuts, from Haldiram's Nagpur plant were recalled in Australia as the product was found to be contaminated with aflatoxin, a highly toxic compound. The product was recalled from retailers and even consumers. 

Warning

In January this year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued 11 warning letters to food manufacturers and processors, including Gadre Marine Export of India, for violations of packaging norms. 

Similarly, the FSSAI is in the process of issuing draft regulations on food recall procedures so that stocks belonging to a specific batch can be completely pulled off the shelves. 

Taking a cue from such incidents, in a meeting held last week, the FSSAI has passed the product recall procedure and will soon forward it to the Law Ministry for further action. 

"We had a meeting with the representatives from food industries, GS1 India (a nonprofit organisation). We discussed the feasibility of executing the product-recall procedure. We will soon forward it to the Law Ministry for further implementation," FSSAI chairperson K. Chandramouli told Mail Today.

Fssai has entrusted the job of tracing counterfeit or tainted packaged products to GS1 India. GS1 is an NGO facilitating collaboration among traders, in order to solve together business challenges that leverage standards and to ensure safety, efficiency and visibility along the entire value chain.

"We get regular complaints regarding counterfeit drugs and food products. We have been able to curtail the sales of counterfeit drugs in past few years, now we are looking at food products. Product recall is uncommon in India, while it is widely practised in other countries," he said. 

The Right to Food Act was signed into law on September 12, 2013 to cover approximately two thirds of India's 1.2 billion people. Thereafter, in October, the Supreme Court directed that the right to life guaranteed under the country's Constitution also includes the right to safe food.

Several incidents of adulterated food distribution have come to light in the last couple of months that have thrown up a huge challenge to the authorities. 

Recall

The industry-driven work of GS1 has led to a standard, which identifies the key principles of traceability and demonstrates how to apply them for effective product recall. This standard is applicable to companies in all industries using GS1 standards, and can be used by companies of all sizes.

The procedure when put in place, will act as a major deterrent to the proliferation of counterfeit products.

"Once the law ministry approves the procedure, the state governments would be directed to implement it," said Chandramouli.

Holograms to fight fakes

Industry bodies are banking on advanced technology to combat the menace of counterfeit products. The fake goods market in India has grown by over 10,000 per cent over the last two decades. 

According to a FICCI report, around 27 products have fake versions in the market ranging from drugs, food items, cosmetics, packaged goods, software and cigarettes. Industry bodies like the Hologram Manufacturers Association of India (HOMAI) are working on new generation anti-counterfeiting solutions to help pharma companies in combating the fake medicines problem. 

The HOMAI member companies are banking on sophisticated holography technology which provides three layers of security.

Pradip Shroff, former president of HOMAI, said: "The fact is that security holograms work as an authentication partner to drug companies. No other competing technology works on so many levels like overt (visible with naked eyes), covert (nonvisible or machine readable) and forensic security which hologram provides." 

Centre and state spar over toxic food

The Centre and Delhi government are busy playing ping-pong when it comes to providing healthy food to people. 

Faced with the question of who should ensure that banned pesticides do not get into the food system, the Central and Delhi governments on Wednesday blamed each other in the Delhi High Court. 

The court hearing began with the amicus curiae, senior advocate Sanjay Jain, who has been asked to assist the court as an independent person, making it clear that the governments were simply trying to "turn ostrich to the harsh realities". 

He said the studies conducted by the Central and Delhi governments, claiming there was no pesticide or chemical residue on fruits and vegetables in Delhi's markets, were futile since the samples were very small and they were tested for the presence of only a few pesticides. 

Amicus curiae, advocate Sanjay Jain, said both Centre and state were failing to address the issue of banned pesticides in fruits and vegetables

"The Union of India and NCT of Delhi in their responses have failed to address the larger issues and only concentrated on testing samples of a few fruits and vegetables to find or rule out traces of only a few pesticides, completely oblivious to the fact that a few test reports on inadequate sample size, not representative in character, cannot address the problem which is of enormous proportions," Jain said. 

Lawyers of both the Centre and state rushed to counter Jain. Delhi government's counsel claimed no banned or restricted pesticides had been found in any of the several samples of fruits and vegetables it had tested, whereas the Centre's counsel argued maintaining of food standards in Delhi was the exclusive duty of the city government.

Unimpressed, the court reminded them that the moot issue related to people's health.