DINAKARAN NEWS

FSSAI unveils initiative to collect, convert used cooking oil into biofuel

FSSAI wants businesses using more than 100 litres of oil for frying to maintain a stock register and ensure that used cooking oil is handed over to registered collecting agencies 

64 companies in 101 locations will enable collection of used cooking oil

NEW DELHI, AUGUST 10

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) on Friday launched RUCO (Repurpose Used Cooking Oil), an initiative that will enable collection and conversion of used cooking oil to bio-diesel. The initiative has been launched nearly a month after the food safety regulator notified standards for used cooking oil.

FSSAI may also look at introducing regulations to ensure that companies that use large quantities of cooking oil hand it over to registered collecting agencies to convert it into biofuel.

Under this initiative, 64 companies at 101 locations have been identified to enable collection of used cooking oil. For instance: McDonald’s has already started converting used cooking oil to biodiesel from 100 outlets in Mumbai and Pune.

The regulator believes India has the potential to recover 220 crore litres of used cooking oil for the production of biodiesel by 2022 through a co-ordinated action. In a statement, Pawan Agarwal, CEO, FSSAI, said, “While biodiesel produced from used cooking oil is currently very small, but a robust ecosystem for conversion and collection is rapidly growing in India and will soon reach a sizable scale.”

“FSSAI wants businesses using more than 100 litres of oil for frying, to maintain a stock register and ensure that UCO is handed over to only registered collecting agencies. There is a possibility that a regulation will be developed on these lines,” he added.

According to FSSAI regulations, the maximum permissible limits for Total Polar Compounds (TPC) have been set at 25 per cent, beyond which the cooking oil is unsafe for consumption.

In partnership

FSSAI is also working in partnership with Biodiesel Association of India and the food industry to ensure effective compliance of used cooking oil regulations, the statement added. It is also going to publish guidance documents, tips for consumers and posters in this regard. It is also conducting several awareness campaigns through its e-channels.

“FSSAI has additionally launched a micro-site to monitor the progress of the collection and conversion of used cooking oil into biodiesel,” the statement added.

Food regulator to engage with educational institutes to create skilled workforce

NEW DELHI, AUGUST 10

FSSAI is establishing a comprehensive framework for engagement with higher education institutes on issues concerning food safety and applied nutrition in a bid to create a future-ready skilled workforce in the food processing industry.

As part of this strategy, the regulator has initiated discussions with vice-chancellors of various universities, academicians, industry and industry associations, besides officials of other Ministries.

“Measures to co-develop and implement an updated curriculum that reflects the shift in thinking from merely preventing adulteration to a more holistic concept of ensuring safe and wholesome food have been discussed,” FSSAI said in a statement.

The framework will adopt a comprehensive approach through the introduction of relevant content in course curricula, enhancing practical learning through internships and fellowships, and promoting interactive learning through opportunities for students to participate in socially relevant projects related to food safety and nutrition.

“A triple E-strategy (Engage, Excite, Enable) to engage effectively with Higher Education Institutes was agreed on,” the statement added.

Check quality of drinking water in hotels, FSSAI told

Current law mandates check of ‘packaged drinking water’

New Delhi, dhns: Lawmakers have asked the food safety regulator to carry out periodic inspection of ordinary drinking water being served in hotels, restaurants and other eating joints to ensure that potable water is being served to the customer.

The food safety law currently mandates the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) to check the quality of only “packaged drinking water” leaving the non-bottled drinking water being served in small and medium-sized restaurants outside the quality net.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health has now directed the FSSAI to undertake timely inspection of the water provided in the food business premises such as eating outlets to ensure that the joints provide clean drinking water to its customers.

In its report submitted in both Houses of the Parliament on Thursday, the panel suggested changing the definition of food to include potable water as well so that food business operators couldn’t take advantage of the loophole in the law.

The committee, headed by Samajwadi Party leader Ramgopal Yadav, also asked the regulator to have a stringent approach on the use of food colour.

“The use of food dyes has to be regulated because time and again, the food dyes have been linked to health problems. Excessive use of colouring matter in food may cause an allergic reaction to some people or hyperactivity in sensitive children,” it said in the report.

The health ministry’s Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme shows food poisoning is one of the commonest outbreaks reported in 2017 apart from the acute diarrhoeal disease. While there were 312 cases of the diarrhoeal diseases out of 1,649 disease outbreaks reported till the third week of December 2017, as many as 242 episodes were due to food poisoning. The incidences diarrhoea and food poisoning are high in places where food is cooked in bulk such as canteens, hotels and wedding venues.

Health ministry officials said food-borne illnesses were a greater health burden comparable to malaria, HIV/AIDS or tuberculosis. The root cause is unsafe, contaminated food and water. Because of poor food safety standards, the government in 2006 brought the Food Safety and Standards Act to replace nearly a dozen existing regulations. The authority was set up two years later and the law became operational from August 2011.

Seven years later, the Parliamentarians recognised there were flaws in the law that need to be corrected, the authority needed to staffed better and testing infrastructure required a boost.

GM Food: “Regulatory Vacuum” But Sale Not “Disallowed” says FSSAI

Pawan Agarwal, the CEO of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), admits there is a “regulatory vacuum” governing food containing material from genetically-engineered (GE) plants. He, however, shares that their manufacture, import and sale in India is not “disallowed.”

“The view of the authority is, based on scientific evidence across the world, that there is no verifiable health impact of GM (genetically-modified) food vis-à-via conventional food on humans,” Agarwal told The Quint.

Agarwal made that clarification after the Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment (CSE) published a report at the end of July that of 65 food samples it had examined, 21 had tested positive for GM material and of these, 16 were imported.

Alarm Versus Reality

The CSE report said various brands of imported canola oil, corn kernels, puffs and syrup, tofu, infant feeds and domestic brands of cottonseed oil were found to contain material from GE plants. CSE has raised an alarm, calling their sale without FSSAI approval as “illegal.” CSE’s director-general Sunita Narain was worried about food safety, because “GM food involves taking genes (DNA) from different organisms and inserting them in food crops. There is concern that this ‘foreign’ DNA can lead to risks such as toxicity, allergic reactions, nutritional and unintended impacts.”

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says on its website, that “it is not aware of any information showing that bio engine-ed foods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way, or that, as a class, foods developed by the new techniques present any different or greater safety concern than foods developed by traditional plant breeding.”

US FDA also does not use the term “genetically modified” when referring to food, because technically, it is the plant that is genetically engineered and not the food. It prefers the phrase “food derived from genetically-engineered plants.”

GE crops have to meet a higher standard of proof for the absence of toxins and allergy-causing substances than those obtained through conventional breeding, before they are approved for cultivation.

Regulatory Vacuum in India

India’s Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) requires these crops to pass two levels of bio- safety trials in confined conditions before they are recommended for mass cultivation. In India only GE cotton has been allowed to be cultivated since 2002.

The cottonseed oil and meal that India produces is derived almost entirely from cotton that has been bioengineered to kill boll worms. But six centres of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) told a parliamentary committee last year that they did find GE cottonseed or oil cake derived from it harming goats, lamb, fish, chicken or cows.

The manufacture, import and sale of food products derived from GE crops are regulated by the Environment Protection Act. But these are no longer under the purview of the environment ministry, its adviser Sujata Arora said, as the powers have been transferred to FSSAI.

Explaining the regulatory vacuum, Agarwal said the law establishing the authority was enacted in 2006. It became operational in 2011 but till 2016, the environment ministry, through an order, kept the FSSAI’s regulatory powers in abeyance. FSSAI’s scientific committee has now made draft regulations for food containing GM material which will have to be approved by the government before the public comments are invited.

The ‘Label’ Issue

B.V. Mehta, director-general of the Solvent Extractors Association of India, an edible oil industry lobby, said it had applied and obtained open-ended permission in 2007 to import GE soybean oil, in place of six-monthly approvals till then.

Though rapeseed oil imported from Canada, United States and Australia is obtained from GE hybrids and sold in India as canola, Indian law does not require it to be labelled as GM.

The language on the labels it insists on is, “Imported Rapeseed ─ low erucic acid oil. Canola oil. (In addition trade name can also be used.)”

Erucic acid is the substance that gives mustard its pungency, which is why consumers in north and eastern Indian prefer Kacchhi Gani or cold-pressed mustard oil. (Rapeseed is related to mustard). In canola, the erucic acid content has to be less than 2 percent, while in mustard it is 48-50 percent. Lower the erucic acid level, higher is the oleic acid content, which makes it good for the heart, like olive oil. Rupinder Pal Singh Kohli, director of the company that sells Jivo, a popular canola oil brand, said FSSAI’s 2018 draft regulations have proposed labeling when GM material in edible oil exceeds 5 percent by weight. He said Jivo is processed at a temperature of 200-240 degrees centigrade before it is bottled and it unlikely that any GE protein fragments would remain in the oil.

Experts Find Lacunae in Methodology

Deepak Pental, geneticist and former vice-chancellor of Delhi University opposed labeling as it would unnecessarily prejudice consumers against food obtained from GE plants. Pental led the team that developed the GE mustard hybrid, DMH-11, which the GEAC recommended last year for cultivation. But it has not received the go-ahead from environment minister Harsh Vardhan.

Pradeep Burma, professor and head of the department of genetics, Delhi University, said the CSE study “lacks rigor in experimental design and analysis.” The methodology it has used ─ Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) ─ is extremely sensitive and can pick up minuscule traces of DNA from all kinds of samples, he said. So robust controls should be in place to ensure it does not pick up contaminants. The manual for the test kit used in the CSE investigation recommends three control reactions: negative control, positive control and extraction control. While negative control has been used there is no extraction control, he said.

Burma said most samples in the study have thrown up similar Ct values. This is not possible because different material – Bt cotton leaf, food containing material obtained from GE plants like corn, and oil derived from transgenic crops – will carry different amounts of transgenic DNA. For example, the Ct value of 27.7 for 35S P (a promoter derived from the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus and found in most GE plants) in Hudson brand canola oil and of 28.5 in Bt cotton leaf does not reflect the expected differences. (Ct value is inversely proportional to the DNA/RNA present in a sample).

The yield of DNA from a transgenic plant where all the cells will have genetically engineered DNA is expected to be much higher than in oil where most of the DNA will get degraded and fragmented in the course of processing. In the CSE study the Ct values of the oil sample show more amount of 35SP DNA in comparison to those in Bt cotton leaf samples.

CSE has been asked to comment on Burma’s comments. This story will be updated when we receive them.

(Vivian Fernandes is editor of www.smartindianagriculture.in. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

Highway eateries checked for hygiene

Vadodara: Teams of the Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC) on Friday cracked down upon highway eateries and ‘dhabas’ located on the national highway and roads connecting it to the city. Officers also visited street food vendors to check if they had started implementing the hygiene tips given to them in a workshop recently.

Food safety officers of the civic body checked nine eateries located near Kapurai Crossroads, Ajwa Crossroads and Golden Crossroads in the city limits. Officials collected nine samples of food items from these eateries. The samples will be tested at the public health laboratory of the VMC.

The drive revealed that six of the nine eateries were not maintaining hygienic standards. The officers issued notices to all the six eateries.

In the evening, teams visited the Kamatibaug, Fatehgunj and other areas of the city to check if street food vendors were following tips given to them during a recent workshop. It came to light that many of them had started using aprons and caps as suggested by the experts. They were also seen trying to ensure that other suggestions were implemented.