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WHO calls on RI to boost food safety levels
Calls are mounting for the government to upgrade its food safety standards as the world focuses on the issue during the commemoration of World Health Day, which falls on April 7
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alls are mounting for the government to upgrade its food safety standards as the world focuses on the issue during the commemoration of World Health Day, which falls on April 7.
Food safety is the theme of this year's World Health Day, and the WHO is calling on countries, policymakers, farmers, food handlers, families and individuals to make food safety a priority as an estimated 700,000 children die of diarrhea every year in Southeast Asia.
'Bacteria, viruses, parasites, chemicals and other contaminants in our food can cause over 200 diseases ranging from diarrhea to cancer. New and emerging threats such as climate change and its impact on food production; emerging biological and environmental contamination ' all pose challenges to the safety of our food,' WHO Southeast Asia regional director Poonam Khetrapal Singh said in a statement.
Unfortunately, Indonesia still has a long way to go before it can ensure food safety to its people as the country severely lacks adequate food safety standards, according to University of Indonesia public health dean Agustin Kusumayati.
'In general, we severely lack food safety standards, maybe because of a lack of priority [on the government side] to develop them. That's why it's hard for us to apply reward and punishment [with food producers],' she said on Wednesday.
The government is currently working on issuing more Indonesian National Standards (SNI) for food and agriculture products to improve its food safety standards, according to the Agriculture Ministry's agriculture production and marketing director general, Ita Munardini.
'At the moment, we have about 500 SNIs, but only a few are mandatory while the rest aren't,' she told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.
Ita said the ministry aimed to increase the number of mandatory SNIs in order to boost food safety in the country.
'Food safety standards are vital. If we don't have them, our producers will not be able to compete [with foreign producers],' she said. 'Let's say we don't have a standard for tomato production, which means there would be no limit in the use of pesticides in tomato production. If that were the case, then tomatoes from all over the world could come into the country without any restrictions.'
Ita said the reason Indonesia still lacked food safety standards was because they were expensive to develop.
'One product needs hundreds of millions of rupiah. It needs research and lab testing. The process takes a long time,' she said.
Likewise, Agustin said her university also found researching food safety standards costly and time consuming.
'If we can't research food safety standards, we'd have to use other countries' benchmarks,' she said. 'But if we wanted to do that, we'd have to ratify [agreements]. That's not easy either.'
Agustin argued that having food safety standards was not enough to ensure consumer safety as food safety involved lots of stakeholders.
For example, industries operating along riverbanks would be responsible for their own waste disposal and avoid polluting the water and contaminating the fish, while fishermen and traders would have to refrain from adding dangerous substances to their fish.
