NEW DELHI: Countries all over the world have come together to revise international standards for food safety and quality, even as concerns have grown in India in the past two months after the food regulator cracked down on major brands including Maggi, Top Ramen and some products of Tata Starbucks.
As many as 185 countries, including India and the European Union, are likely to adopt new food safety and quality standards.
The new norms will contain stringent benchmarks for various categories such as level of lead, standards for safe use of food additives and pesticides, new standards for ginseng products as well as guidelines on how food should be labelled according to the level of potassium consumption associated with a reduced risk of diet-related non-communicable diseases.
This is significant because recently when a lot of products including Nestle's Maggi were recalled from the Indian market, the regulator here had raised concerns on many of these grounds. While some packaged food products in India were found containing harmful substances such as lead and monosodium glutamate (MSG), many companies were caught flouting labeling and packaging norms.
The Codex Alimentarius Commission, a joint inter-governmental body of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO), is meeting in Geneva this week.
The agenda is to review the existing standards for food safety and quality, while also revising and adopting new standards to upgrade the regulation to address the changes in the marketplace.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of Indian (FSSAI), which is the central enforcement agency for food regulation, also follows Codex standards to keep a check on products available in the Indian market.
While the Indian regulator has already expanded its probe to milk, packaged drinking water, energy drinks and edible oil etc, the international meet will also witness discussions over prevention of residues of certain antibiotics in food of animal origin, control of parasites and levels of toxins in cereal grains, flours etc.
Recently, the FSSAI also asked state food inspectors to keep a close watch on food products of mass consumption and increase the frequency of sampling and testing of such products.
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