The Maggi controversy is quite queer. Not long ago, the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) tested milk nationwide and found 70% milk adulterated. It happened about the same time that China executed people for adulterating milk with melamine in 2008. The 2006 Food Safety Act had just become operational in 2011 and here was one important food item — for rich and poor, young (most importantly children) and old — found to be a vector of all possible microbes and extraneous particles. India was producing what could well be called the most ‘complete milk’: complete with detergents, edible oils, colours, urea, water, you name it. The media, unsurprisingly, went into a frenzy. It seemed the moment of reckoning. No more unsafe milk! No more unsafe food! Then came the machismo: we are not some feeble, effete society of consumers that ‘mundane’ milk could undo us.
Before this, pesticides in soft drinks had received much attention. No machismo but sheer prudence in this case. It was reckoned that the poor do not drink Coca-Cola or Pepsi, and the rich can choose to splurge less. So, overall, it wasn’t a big deal. Did anything change? Not really. Then there was Maggi. This was about beware customer, beware government and beware deceitful Nestlé. The upshot of all this hysteria is that Indian consumers remain woefully unaware and uninformed. This is reflected in facile prudence or dangerous bravado that follows every food safety-related outrage.
The government is overstretched. Today, India’s command-and-control approach to food safety has severe limitations, given the lack of physical, human and institutional capital for administering food safety. India needs a paradigm shift from relying solely on supply-side food safety and develop demand-pull systems for it. Demand-pull systems work with consumers demanding quality and safety attributes in food and forcing the supply side to fall in line, else face punitive market response. A true demand-pull system includes government and its agencies in the ambit as culpable if found wanting.
When food is not a lemon
Food safety in a product is a credence attribute. Hence, it faces issues of asymmetric information between sellers and buyers. This asymmetry can lead to market failures akin to the ‘lemons market’ — a ‘lemon’ being a defective used car — in the classic work of Nobel laureate George Akerlof. The solutions that fellow Nobel winners prescribed for correcting such market failures — such as signalling (Michael Spence) and screening (Joseph Stiglitz) — apply here too.
The message to take home in this is that the government needs to intervene not only as a controller but also as an agency to facilitate signalling and screening mechanisms. Without this, there will be a ‘lemons market’ for milk, Maggi and a lot more. However, the signalling or screening mechanisms are contingent on consumers having a minimum level of knowledge and awareness.
As of now, consumers do not know what is ‘safe food’ and how and where to get it. Hence, the government needs to create a credible, commonly accepted and acknowledged system of third-party food certification and educate the consumers about it in a mission mode.
The FSSAI has created labels for some processed food. But these are hardly recognised. How far such labelling has made consumers aware about the certification and its elements also remains unclear. Also, a Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification system for fresh products that is more urgently needed remains an unfinished business.
A credible certification system is a double-edged sword if it informs about what the certification entails. It not only tells the consumer how good the certified product is, but it also tells her how bad the uncertified product could be.
Consumers would know adequately about food safety only if it is taught from a young age in schools. Not teaching them young has first-order consequences, as the epidemic disregard for standing in a queue in India will testify.
Let’s be real here. The task of ensuring food safety with such diverse value chains is a gigantic one for even the most well-meaning government. The government can undertake massive awareness campaigns and signal intent with severe strictures for laxity in food safety. Unless this happens, there will be many more Maggis to boil. What is surprising is not that Maggi has been indicted but that onlyMaggi has been picked out.
Rejoice Over Spilt Milk
The news on food safety awareness is disappointing. As part of a study to assess awareness of urban dairy consumers in Pune, we asked consumers about the changes they made following the news about food safety failure in milk. ‘Almost none’ to ‘very little’ were the common responses.
Less than half among educated and comparatively high-income consumers in Pune did not know that it’s important to have pasteurised milk. More than 80% did not know about adulterants in milk other than water. For zoonotic diseases — which can be passed from animals to humans — the awareness was near zero. If only consumers knew what to look for and where to get it, they would be able to do the right thing by demanding food safety. The seller, in turn, would have to respond by getting its house in order.
(The writer is research fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute)
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