Editorial
The adulteration menace
Face it on an emergency footing
Uncontrolled use of hazardous chemicals by traders to preserve, colour or make food items attractive now poses a deadly threat to public health.
Experts, policymakers and media representatives present at a roundtable held on Tuesday at The Daily Star premises voiced their alarm about this grave danger now staring the nation in the face.
City corporations/municipalities and the department of public health are generally responsible for looking into food safety standards and penalising the offenders. Some mobile courts under the city corporations have been conducting drives to catch food adulterators in the act and punish them. The Bangladesh Standard and Testing Institution (BSTI) with its limited manpower, on the other hand, only carries out the quality check and provides certification to some 60 packaged food products out of some 150, both packaged and loose items, on sale in the market.
In spite of all the ongoing efforts, there has been little effect on the profiteering motive of the adulterators that has crossed all limits. That calls for adopting desperate measures to prevent and cure the social disease that has reached desperate proportions.
Since the existing oversight measures are increasingly proving inadequate, a special strategy to counter the menace must come into play at the institutional level. We suggest an inter-ministerial panel at the top, with the respective ministries having a task force each at the operational level. The task forces should be in constant touch with the directorate of public health, the department of environment and the BSTI and law enforcement agencies.
The government response aside, the consumers as well as the community at large should come forward to resist the evil practice.
To this end, the publicity wings of the government, the local government bodies, the print and the electronic media should conduct well-designed public awareness campaigns about the do's and don'ts concerning adulterated foods. The non-government organisations (NGOs), too, can lend a hand in the effort.
In all, the people must be well-conversant with the safety standards of their foods as well as the ways to obtain legal advice and take the offenders to court.
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