Food Safety Authority: How effective is it in ensuring safe food?

Bangladesh Food Safety Authority (BFSA) had been formed with the goal of ensuring food safety in the country on the lines of USA’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Their job is to ensure safety of the import, export and locally produced food through coordination and regulation over all the local and foreign agencies concerned.

However BFSA hasn’t been able to fulfill that objective even after nine years of its formation. So, they are failing to play an effective role in ensuring safe food for the citizens of the country.

A survey conducted recently in the country has found the presence of harmful components in various food items including soybean oil and egg. Plus, the food items are being polluted in different ways.

People are suffering various short and long tern complexities from consuming adulterated food. They are suffering many financial and social damages. People are dying too. BFSA says that efforts are on to ensure food safety. If a food item isn’t safe those will be destroyed.

According to UK-based Economist Impact’s Global Food Security Index 2022, in terms of quality and safety Bangladesh stands 71th among 113 countries of the world. Food in Bangladesh is more unsafe than that of neighbouring Myanmar (65th) and India (67th).

Under this circumstance, ‘National Food Safety Day’ was observed in the country yesterday, Friday. BFSA was formed as country’s central regulatory body in February 2015.

It has been stated in the law that BFSA will “control activities related to food production, import, processing, storing, supply, marketing and sales through coordination.”  

It has been learned that 18 ministries, departments, agencies and more than 486 organisations of the local government department are involved with food safety management.  

There are several other local and foreign organisations that play a direct or indirect role in ensuring food safety. Yet the authorities have been able to sign MoUs with only seven government, four non-government and four foreign organisations so far.

BFSA director (food lab network coordination) Sahadev Chandra Saha told Prothom Alo, “There’s no such precondition that there has to be agreements with everyone otherwise we won’t be able to work.”

However acknowledging that the authority is failing to fully accomplish the duty they have been charged with he said, “The radius of our duty is expanding but we couldn’t yet become the sole authority. It needs time.”

According to ShareAmerica, a platform created by US department of state to represent the society, culture and lifestyle of that country, FDA ensures the matter of safety for all food items produced in USA. This organisation quality controls 78 per cent of the food supply in the US.

Nonetheless, BFSA is failing to play any distinctive role in controlling the import and export products of Bangladesh. The agency does not control or inspect the food and food ingredients being imported in the country.

BFSA however claims that the matter of maintaining quality and safety of all the imported items had been discussed in the central committee coordination meeting recently. The issue of forming regulations to ensure safety of import goods was also raised in the meeting.

BFSA director Sahadev Chandra Saha said, “Our job will be easier once the regulations have been formed. Then, when an imported product arrives we’ll be able to test the sample and tell if it’s hygienic or not.  If it’s hygienic, it will be allowed to enter otherwise it won’t.”

The organisation neither even has any distinct role in exporting products. Instead of Export Promotion Bureau (EPB), BFSA has been relied with the duty of providing health certificate in exporting food products.

While several food products were exported, they had provided health certificate for exporting only 14 food items of six companies in 2022-23 fiscal year.

It has been learned that BFSA doesn’t have any lab of their own to test the samples. Former BFSA member, now a professor at the food technology and rural industries department of Bangladesh Agricultural University Md Abdul Alim told Prothom Alo that FDA regulates both food and drugs in the US.

In Bangladesh, drugs are regulated by the health ministry. And it’s tough to bring it under the jurisdiction of the food ministry (BFSA is under the food ministry).

Then again, quality controller of food items, BSTI is under the supervision of the industries ministry while the matter of export and import is overseen by the commerce ministry.

BFSA will be lot more effective if these can be brought under control. Indeed the government has to take the initiative for sorting out the complications, he added.

There are total 19 posts including chairman, member, secretary, director, food safety officer, monitoring officer, research officer, scientific officer, food analyst, legal officer and statistics officer at the organisation. According to data from last fiscal year, there are 309 officers deployed in these posts.

BFSA has their head office at BSL Complex in capital’s Shahbag area. Besides, they have city offices in every divisional city. There are total eight food safety officers with one in each of these offices. Also there are district offices with one officer and one or more subordinates.

Officials say that it’s not realistic to monitor the food safety of the entire district with such a small staff.  

BFSA assigns four types of grades to the hotels and restaurants in the country based on how safe their food is. Restaurants with very good quality of food are graded ‘A+’, good ones get ‘A’, average ones get ‘B’ and the below average ones are either given ‘C’ grade or no grade at all.

The goal is to help customers understand the quality of food served at the restaurants from seeing the grades. However, only 306 restaurants from across the country have been graded in the last five years. Whereas according to a survey run by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) in 2021, the number of hotels and restaurants operating in the country is 436,000 (4 lakh 36 thousand).

BFSA operates mobile courts also. If they find adulteration or any other irregularities in the food they sentence the person concerned to imprisonment or fines them. Conducting 165 mobile court drives in the 2022-23 fiscal year, they have filed cases against 136 persons and imposed fines worth Tk 15.9 million (1.59 crore).

However, different city corporations, district administration, upazila parishad, law and order enforcement agencies and the directorate of national consumers’ right protection also conduct similar type of activities. People concerned say that whatever activities BFSA has been conducting are really inadequate as well as redundant.

BFSA inspects places like the market, restaurants and food factories. Issues like how the food is prepared, if it’s produced in a hygienic way, if proper nutritional quality is maintained or if there’s a health concern are checked during inspection.

With this factories are encouraged to produce and serve safe food. If these are not followed even after several warnings, mobile court drive is conducted. BFSA teams inspected total 7,564 food establishments in 2021-22 fiscal year. And the number went up to 11,754 in 2022-23 fiscal year.

While the numbers of inspection have increased, sample collection has declined. Samples of food items such as meat, egg and milk are collected and tested to see if it’s safe or not. As many as 1,282 samples were tested in the 2021-22 fiscal year.

Out of them 152 samples contained different elements in higher amounts than the approved limit. And in the 2022-23 fiscal year the number of samples tested reduced to 1,070 with 91 of them containing various components more than the approved standard.

According to ShareAmerica, unsafe food can cause 200 plus diseases. This causes a loss of more than USD 110 billion (11,000 crore) globally counting the production loss and treatment cost in. As per World Health Organization (WHO) records, as many as 420,000 (4.2 lakh) people die of food-borne diseases throughout the world every year.

People concerned believe that BFSA needs to play a more effective part in ensuring safe food for people. Former member of the organisation Abdul Alim believes that government initiatives are needed to make the organisation effective.