The Public Health Ministry and the Lailac milk issue

The ensuing Lailac milk brouhaha involving the Ministry of Public Health, the Government Analyst Food and Drugs Department (GAFDD) and the private sector distributor, International Pharmaceutical Agency (IPA), lays bare the longstanding and abject weakness of the authorities in the matter of the effective enforcement of regulations that have to do with monitoring the importation of foreign-manufactured foods into the country. On the basis of the available evidence and for a number of reasons we are evidently no nearer to solving this problem, though it is clear that we may well be continuing to ignore it at our own peril.

This newspaper has learnt from an official source that the enforcement authorities are so weak in this particular area that it has become a common practice for the relevant ‘permits’ to be sought by some importers only after the goods have arrived here and in some instances cleared from Customs. What this means, of course, is that in cases where, for example, the GAFDD deems those particular consignments of goods to be ineligible for importation it must then go after the distributor directly (since the goods have already been cleared from Customs and in the possession of the distributor) which, for a host of reasons, can be an arduous task.

Mind you, one might argue, the Customs can play a role here by simply not releasing the goods unless and until the paperwork is tendered. That, of course, gives rise to other issues and other complications that have to do with the integrity of our systems.

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of the continued growth of the global fake foods industry including the manufacture of fake infant formulas that target the poorest countries and many of the poorer homes in those countries. Guyana’s growing challenge of keeping out potentially harmful food imports also coincides with resort to increasingly stringent legislation in developed countries designed to ensure, as far as possible, that imported foods do not pose health threats to their populations. One has to wonder whether our own lack of vigilance in the matter of food imports might not raise questions in the minds of potential buyers regarding the standards of our own food exports.

In previous interviews with this newspaper, some of which go back several years, the GAFDD has not only admitted to its lack of capacity for enforcement both in terms of keeping unwanted goods out of Guyana and removing them from the local market once they are placed there, but has also made clear its view that it is the Ministry of Health’s (now Public Health) failure to provide the department with the tools to do its job that is largely responsible for this state of affairs. One might add, of course, that this is not a new problem though that fact does nothing to dwarf the urgency associated with correcting it.  Moreover, it has been our experience that when issues like the present Lailac matter surface it is invariably difficult to get the ministry to speak with any clarity. In this instance, while there has been a slew of correspondence between the Ministry of Public Health and IPA on the Lailac issue and even when it is known that state-run health facilities have had to return allocations of Lailac milk to the Ministry’s Materials Management Unit, the Public Health Ministry has been, for the most part, cagey, in response to questions which we have posed on this matter. Put differently, while dialogue between the GAFDD and the IPA has been ensuing since at least February this year and while the ministry has been, for some time now, aware of the problem, some of its senior officials have studiously pretended (at least publicly) that a problem does not exist.

This, of course, brings us to the question of whether the flow of important information from officialdom to the public, through the media, does not still remain in the hands of a handful of officials and whether or not, even then, there are not instances in which information that correctly belongs in the public domain is not required to undergo a prior process of official distillation. There is, of course, neither the time nor the space to ventilate this matter here.

Seemingly out of the blue, Minister of Public Health George Norton is now being reported as saying that if the IPA continues to be delinquent in response to the GAFDD directive that the milk be removed from circulation, then the police should be called in. The question that arises of course, is, why only now is the Minister making such a pronouncement when there is correspondence that provides irrefutable evidence that the GAFDD had, months ago, pronounced definitively on the status of the Lailac milk and required the distributor to recall it. Would it not be reasonable to assume that ‒ with all that had been going on between the GAFDD and IPA ‒ the Minister would (or at least should) have been kept apprised and would therefore have been in a position, long before now, to make a firm and definitive pronouncement on the issue.

Perhaps the best that can be said in this instance is that officialdom, on occasion, continues to display a peculiarly quixotic posture in the matter of the enforcement of important regulations and that in the particular instance of food imports that posture continues to be manifested by the sustained dwarfing of the importance of the GAFDD as a regulatory agency, even though there is a surfeit of evidence of the presence on the local market of a bewildering array of food items not sanctioned by the GAFDD which, moreover, may well threaten to compromise public health. In this day and age of global focus on a mindfulness of food consumption as an index of the health of a country’s population, that is a worrying sign.

PS: IPA began the withdrawal of Lailac milk yesterday.