More than half of all food vendors in Guyana may well not have the requisite public health credentials to provide service in the sector because of deficiencies in their food-handling standards, Director of the Government Analyst Food and Drugs Department Marlan Cole has told the Stabroek Business.
Speaking with this newspaper shortly after he had delivered the feature address at a seminar for food handlers at the Ocean View International Hotel on Wednesday, Cole said the complete absence of official control over the informal element of the food-handling sector meant that there was “simply no way of monitoring who was compliant and who wasn’t… the problem is as it has always been. People provide food services from their living rooms, kitchens and from street corners and there is simply no way that you can determine their food safety credentials when the situation is like that. There are simply no controls.”
Asked about the monitoring role of his own department, Cole declared that official neglect of the need to strengthen the GAFDD had meant that the department simply lacked the capacity to properly monitor the food handling sector to determine where there are irregularities. “We don’t have the capacity, on our own, to deal with the food-handling related issues,” he said. “We depend on the support of other agencies for support and there are times when coordination can be quite a challenge. What is happening is that we are doing our best in a less than ideal situation.” The GAFDD Director added that he doubted whether the bona fides of even some of the urban vendors certified by City Hall could be vouched for.
The mushrooming of roadside and corner shop trading in cooked meals as a response to high unemployment has created additional challenges for what is already poorly equipped monitoring institutions. Cole said that while there is always the making-a-living argument there was no way that that should be allowed to interfere with what is “an official obligation to protect the consuming public.”
And according to Cole the food handling issue was not just a domestic public health issue. There is also the issue of the impact of a questionable food safety reputation on visitor arrivals in Guyana. “Cases of advisories from foreign countries asking visitors to exercise caution in eating food off the streets can impact negatively on visitors wanting to travel here,” Cole said adding that the country cannot afford this at a time when developments in the economy meant that Guyana was attracting a higher level of international attention.
Cole said that the “considerable responsibilities associated with monitoring standards amongst food handlers” serve as an addition to the already onerous burden of overseeing the administration of food importation into Guyana, an issue that contracts widespread public controversy.
Observers have commented on what they say has been the frequent intervention of the Ministry of Public Health in decisions made by the GAFDD on the importation of consignments of food into the country that do not meet with local regulations. Asked whether he felt there were “autonomy-related issues” with the department, Cole would only say that while “under the law” the GAFDD is autonomous “the department is overseen by the Ministry of Public Health.”
The Department’s monitoring responsibilities in the food-handling sector, Cole stated, have also been a function of the low priority placed on providing sufficient numbers of trained staff to meet those responsibilities.
The week’s seminar was attended by about 40 service providers in the sector though there was no indication of meaningful representation amongst major restaurants and eateries. Cole explained that while the sensitization forum was intended to sensitize and update food handlers on a biannual basis, its periodicity had been affected by funding challenges.
And according to Cole, given the far-flung nature of the food service industry there was need for an effective public information dissemination structure but that the GAFDD had not been the beneficiary of such a service over the years. “We rely primarily on the newspapers, radio and television. We have no Facebook page, no website,” Cole said.
In his address to the forum, Cole referred to a Burden of Illness (BOI) study in which Guyana, among a number of Caricom countries had participated – under the auspices of the World Health Organization, Pan American Health Organization and the Caribbean Epidemiology Centre in as it relates to the prevalence of food-borne diseases. He said that in the case of Guyana, the results had suggested that food-handling considerations were likely to afflict every Guyanese at least once a year and that the cost of this to the country’s economy was around US$23 million. Cole said that it would be by no means surprising if the situation might have actually worsened since then.
